...by Henry Sene Yee Design

The Lolita Cover Project

2011-11-09T12:30:00.016-05:00

by Vladimir Nabokov

The Lolita Cover Project, John Bertram and Marco Sonzogni, editors.

John Bertram and Marco Sonzogni are publishing a book on Lolita covers and asked a slew of cover designers to contribute conceptual covers.

slew also slue
noun Informal
A large amount or number; a lot: a slew of unpaid bills.
Origin: 1830-40, Americanism; [Old Irish Gaelic sluagh or slúag, crowd, throng, multitude, army, host.]

Here is mine:

Henry:
I’d like to invite you to participate in a book that I am editing called The Lolita Cover Project which uses images (specifically, ‘conceptual’ book covers) and essays about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita to addresses the challenges and limits of representation (and mis-representation), and the relationship of a book to its cover. The Lolita Cover Project will feature 50 new ‘conceptual’ covers by leading graphic designers specifically commissioned for the book; critical essays on design and representation by Nabokov scholars, artists, art theorists, and designers; and the best submissions from Venus febriculosa’s Lolita Book Cover Contest (In 2009, after discovering Covering Lolita, Dieter E. Zimmer’s online collection of Lolita covers, I sponsored, through my website Venus febriculosa, a book cover competition for a new cover for Lolita. Subsequently, my essay on the competition was published in the ‘Nabokov Online Journal.’).

Many leading designers are on board to provide new covers including:
Mark Abrams, Keira Alexandra, Geetika Alok, Helen Armstrong, Andrey Bashkin, Rachel Berger, Kelly Blair, Yeju Choi, David Drummond, Aliza Dzik, Elaine Fong, John Fulbrook III, Xavi Garcia, David Gee, Elena Giavaldi, Kate Gibb, Elena Grossman, Kathryn Hammill, Lauren Harden, Margot Harrington, Jessica Helfand, Karen Hsu, Matthew Jacobson, Agata Jakubowska, Jamie Keenan, Philip Kelly, Ely Kim, Gregg Kulick, Chin-Yee Lai, Sueh Li, Ellen Lupton, Mary Voorhees Meehan, Mark Melnick, Peter Mendelsund, Dan Mogford, Catherine Nippe, Linn Olofsdotter, Ingrid Paulson, David Pearson, Caroline Rismont, Diane Shaw, Isaac Tobin, Transfer Studio, Jenny Volvovski, Michel Vrana, Jennifer Wang, Chip Wass, Adrienne Weiss, Barbara deWilde, Gabriele Wilson, Ben Wiseman, Graham Wood, Henry Sene Yee, and April

Lolita is one of my favorite all-time books. Many of the existing covers designed from around the world, showcased here at Covering Lolita, put the focus on an eroticized image of Lolita. I wanted to avoid that and focus on Nabokov's writing. The opening paragraph is one of the most famous.
I went for a light, innocent fragility so I chose Archer Light for the typeface. Although Humbert Humbert, a middle aged man, is seen as the obvious manipulator of young, under aged Lolita, he is also manipulated by Lolita. I filled the type in an innocent baby pink color and towards the end of the paragraph, the tone and color gradient shifts to darker red and finally black to suggest the novel's downward spiral of darkness. I especially like how her name bookends the paragraph. With "Lo. Lee. Ta." taking on a menacing syncopated stabbing rhythm.

The 100 Best First Lines from Novels.

An excellent post by Designer Extraordinaire Peter Mendelsund discussing the process of jacketing works of fiction using Lolita as a case study.

The Paris Review Interviews with Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction, No. 40. Interviewed by Herbert Gold

Nabokov on different Lolita covers:

Vladimir Nabokov discusses his brillant novel "Lolita" on "Close Up", a circa 1950's CBC program:

The Police singing "Don't Stand So Close to Me," (1980)

The song deals with the mixed feelings of lust, fear and guilt that a female student has for a school teacher and vice versa, and inappropriateness leading to confrontation. The music and lyrics of the song were written by the lead singer of The Police, Sting, who had previously worked as an English teacher that includes the line "Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov."

The Breaks

2011-09-12T11:33:00.014-04:00

by Richard Price / Picador

Cover photograph by Stephen Shames/Polaris

From the Bestselling Author of Lush Life

Peter Keller, first college grad from a working-class Yonkers family, thought he was on the road to success. Until no law school wanted him. As he watches his friends advance into promising careers, he jumps from job to job—mail clerk, phone solicitor, stand-up comic—until he breaks down and starts phoning in bomb threats on his own house. He’s going to have to work hard to change the pattern of self-sabotage that has defined most of his life. And taking that job at his alma mater as a teacher of freshman comp and starting an affair with a violently psychotic ex-wife of a colleague probably won’t help matters. Richard Price’s brilliant comic novel is a classic tale of a young man trying to find his place in the world.

A very nice behind the scenes interview with me at The Casual Optimist Blog on my Richard Price series designs and my photography.

Alternate comp:

Ladies' Man

2011-09-12T11:33:00.006-04:00

by Richard Price / Picador

From the Bestselling Author of Lush Life

Kenny Becker just dumped his girlfriend—the reasons are a little complex. Young and newly unemployed, his main assets at the moment are six-pack abs and a healthy libido—he’s ready to get out, find a little action, and maybe find himself too. But New York is no place for the lonely, and with one meaningless sexual encounter after another, Kenny begins to wonder if the singles scene is not itself a complete con job, with his heart and his future at stake. Raunchy, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, this 1978 clubland slice-of-life displays Richard Price in gritty good form.

A very nice behind the scenes interview with me at The Casual Optimist Blog on my Richard Price series designs and my photography.

Alternate comp:

HEART of the CITY: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York

2011-09-08T11:11:00.016-04:00

by Ariel Sabar

Creative Director: Alex Camlin // Da Capo Press/Perseus Books Group
Photographs by Henry Sene Yee

“The couples in this book hail from across America and the world. Most don’t live in New York City. Some never did. What mattered to me was that they met there, in one of its iconic public places. Each of the nine stories begins just before that chance meeting—when they are strangers, oblivious to how, in moments, their lives will irrevocably change.”
—from the Introduction

The handsome Texas sailor who offers dinner to a runaway in Central Park. The Midwestern college girl who stops a cop in Times Square for restaurant advice. The Brooklyn man on a midnight subway who helps a weary tourist find her way to Chinatown. The Columbia University graduate student who encounters an unexpected object of beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A public place in the world’s greatest city. A chance meeting of strangers. A marriage. Heart of the City tells the remarkable true stories of nine ordinary couples—from the 1940s to the present—whose matchmaker was the City of New York.
Intrigued by the romance of his own parents, who met in Washington Square Park, award-winning author Ariel Sabar set off on a far-ranging search for other couples who married after first meeting in one of New York City’s iconic public spaces. Sabar conjures their big-city love stories in novel-like detail, drawing us into the hearts of strangers just as their lives are about to change forever.
In setting the stage for these surprising, funny, and moving tales, Sabar, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, takes us on a fascinating tour of the psychological research into the importance of place in how—and whether—people meet and fall in love.
Heart of the City is a paean to the physical city as matchmaker, a tribute to the power of chance, and an eloquent reminder of why we must care about the design of urban spaces.

Art director Alex Camlin, (check out this Q+A he did at The Casual Optimist), assigned me this fun project that combined two things that I love and explore in my personal photography:
Serendipitous juxtapositions of people and/or things in the most unexpected places and my favorite place in the world, New York City.

I presented several concept sketches of different approaches but they had a tough time pinpointing a direction for the book. This usually happens when you want the cover to say everything and explain the book. Once you start putting very specific plot elements on the cover, and they're visualized in a literal way, then you are forced to make every detail of each cover element correct. Is this the right time of day in the book? Is that her hair color? Would he write with that pen? I try to avoid that by working with images that are more open to interpretation and hopefully focus more on the emotional aspects of the book. Alex worked with his editors to focus on what was essential. We tried a few more rounds but I was feeling that I wasn't getting want they needed.

Concept sketches:

This comp was inspired by the beautiful opening scene to Woody Allen's film "Manhattan" (1979) underscored with George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue":

Inspired specifically to this scene at the 2:14 mark. Hmmm, 2:14...2/14...February 14...AKA Valentine's Day! Coincidence? I think not. But certainly serendipity.

But in the end, they went back to my very first idea:

I played off of Milton Glaser's iconic I ♥ NY logo. Obvious yes, but with HEART in the title, what else could it be? I shot the cover over some peeling paint found on a subway station column. As a bonus, I was happy I was able to use some of my personal photos throughout the jacket:

A brief video interview with Milton Glaser, designer of the the iconic "I Love New York" (logo design c. 1975):

Glaser's 1976 sketch of the logo sketched quickly on a piece of envelope in the back of a cab:

Part of the "I Love New York" tourism campaign of the 1980s, this commercial features celebrities proclaiming why they "love New York.":

A look at the origin of the "I (Heart) New York" ad campaign from a New York state high school student:

Full Black: A Thriller

2011-08-16T00:01:00.008-04:00

By Brad Thor

Art Director: Alan Dingman // Atria Books / Simon & Schuster

#1 New York Times bestselling author Brad Thor brings readers his darkest and most intriguing thriller yet — a terrifying story of espionage and betrayal — brilliantly paced with superb nonstop action.

Born in the shadows and kept from heads of state, there are some missions so deadly, so sensitive, that they simply don’t exist. When one such mission goes horribly wrong, a wave of dramatic terrorist attacks is set in motion. Their goal: the complete and total collapse of the United States.

With the CIA’s intelligence abilities hobbled, former Navy SEAL Team 6 member turned covert counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath launches an audacious plan to infiltrate the terrorists’ network and prevent one of the biggest threats the United States has ever faced.

Simultaneously, a foreign wet work team has been sent to California. Their target: one of Hollywood’s most famous filmmakers. While working on a secret documentary project, movie producer Larry Salomon has unknowingly exposed one of the world’s wealthiest and most politically connected powerbrokers — a man with a radical anti-American agenda poised to plunge the nation into deadly, irreversible chaos.

As the plots rocket to their pulse-pounding conclusion and the identities of the perpetrators are laid stunningly bare, Harvath will be left with only one means to save America. Unable to trust anyone, he will be forced to go Full Black.
Intense and frighteningly realistic, FULL BLACK is, hands down, Brad Thor’s most riveting thriller to date.

Alan Dingman is a fantastic portrait painter / illustrator and an Art Director/Designer at Simon & Schuster Pocket Books. We both worked together at St. Martin’s Press oh so many years ago and I recently hired him to illustrate FAME: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity for me. He called me asking if I could recommend anyone new who could design BIG BOOK COMMERCIAL THRILLERS. I immediately recommended my super talented colleague Ervin Serrano, who is the Associate Art Director at St. Martin's Press. But for some reason, probably my competitive nature, I asked if I could take a stab at it. Now I don’t do many BIG COMMERCIAL BOOK packaging but I told him that I wanted to do more and to give me a chance. I would try one quick go and if he didn’t like it, he could immediately hire someone else. Turns out that they were looking for a new approach to packaging their bestselling author Brad Thor so they were open to something different. What I thought I could offer this genre was a clean, and simple approach. I saw that the author and title were mostly short four letter words that would stack nicely. I had only one idea that I wanted to pursue, a dynamically angled typographic dominant approach.

My first round I tried the angled type set in Trade Gothic Bold Condensed and placed that over a foreboding Washington DC landscape with an ominous glow coming over the horizon. Hmm, that's not going to work. The type forms looked bad and the image was a bland cliché.

Alan sent me a link to a stock photo house that specialized in military type images and I changed the typeface to UNIVERS. Feedback: they thought the type was too playful but they liked the positive/negative interaction with type within the image:

I didn’t want to give up on the angled type. Maybe it was the typeface and not the angle treatment that they had problems with. Maybe the rounded curves of the UNIVERS “R” looked too friendly and the negative spaces were too open and generous and the widths uneven. I like that the “F” filled out the negative space better and the forms were more even. But it felt kinda bland.

Trade Gothic Condensed:

Univers Condensed:

Akzidenzs Grotesk:

Various Akzidenzs Grotesk Angled type configurations:

When I switched to AKZIDENZ GROTESK, I saw that this was more of what I was going for. Even sides, sharper corners and even type color overall. I tried comps using different angle configurations but they went with the type set straight forward, which in the end, I did have to agree with. Hey, I had to try the angle.

It was a challenge positioning the image and type to interact so that the figure's action made sense through the type and still have the type be legible. With each version I tried, I wanted to make sure that the word BLACK stayed mainly all black and create some calm space on the cover that wasn't so active. For something so simple, I presented over 60+ image & color combos, which isn't much considering that BIG BOOK projects can generate 100s and 100s of comps and the hiring of several designers. Big Books = Big Expectations.

The final silhouette had to be adjusted slightly to make it less militaristic and more Black Ops. Here's the final approved design before we Chisel Embossed it up:

I was so happy that the Publisher and author liked this approach off the bat which was a nice surprise. Using genre elements of big type, big author and a silhouetted figure against bright colored background but in a simple, clean and direct way. Good for an ongoing series look. And the book is currently on the New York Times Bestsellers List. Even though Brad Thor is no stranger to the Best Seller list, I like to think that my design had a small part in setting him up to new readers.

Brad AD sighting on the LIRR:

(photograph by Patrice Kaplan)

Author Brad Thor on Piers Morgan Tonight / CNN with my jacket in the background:

CNN Video: Author Brad Thor on the Norway terror attacks:

Designer Paul Bacon is known for introducing the "Big Book Look" in book jacket design. His 1956 jacket design for Compulsion, a novel by Meyer Levin marked the inception of the "Big Book Look". This look features a large, bold title, a prominent author's name, and a small conceptual image:

“The big book look,” by Field Maloney / The New York Times Book Review, February 11, 2007:

The St. Martin's Press "Blues Crew" Art Depts. We were such non-conformist back then.

Left to Right: Evan Gaffney, Junie Lee, Alan Dingman, Judith Stagnitto Abbate, Henry Sene Yee, & Jennifer Chiorazzi

By Nightfall

2011-08-11T12:51:00.003-04:00

by Michael Cunningham // Picador

Cover photograph by Plain Picture / Jeff Spielman

A New York Times Bestseller

Peter and Rebecca Harris, midforties, are prosperous denizens of Manhattan. He’s an art dealer, she’s an editor. They live well. They have their troubles—their ebbing passions, their wayward daughter, and certain doubts about their careers—but they feel as though they’re happy. Happy enough. Until Rebecca’s much younger, look-alike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, short for the Mistake), comes to visit. And after he arrives, nothing will ever be the same again.

This poetic and compelling masterpiece is a heartbreaking look at a marriage and the way we now live. Full of shocks and aftershocks, By Nightfall is a novel about the uses and meaning of beauty, and the place of love in our lives.

OUTTAKES

For the previous Cunningham titles I designed, The Hours, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, and Laws of Creations, I had an unintentional floral motif going on. Like a vine, visually tying them all together. So I originally approach this book in the same way. I hired Marc Yankus to photograph this idea for me. A flower arrangement on an apartment window overlooking the SOHO neighborhood outside. Although pretty, it wasn't the right tone for the book:

I found this previously shot image on Marc's website. Although it connected with the storyline, we didn't want to suggest that this was a gay novel. Plus, it had already been used on another cover:

We then wanted to get a sense of the city at night. Not any specific neighborhood but more dream like. To suggest getting lost and searching for something. I tried using one of my photographs but it was too vague:

Approved comp:

Everyone loved this chosen image. Right before it went to the printers, I had to add a New York Times Bestseller to the front. It gave me a moment to rethink my original type solution which bugged me. The serifs were too thin and quiet and I wanted it to interact with the image more. So first, I changed all my type to the beautiful Archer, and then centered and anchored it to the red traffic light. I decided to pivot the entire type block on a slight counter clockwise rotation to match the slight skew of the photo's horizon line and positioned it uncomfortably tight to the top. Just to make it not so perfect. Everyone has been so kind to warn me that the type is crooked on the cover.
Thanks, but it's a designer's thing. I hope you understand.

Michael Cunningham & James Franco Meet: Part I of III

Humiliation: BIG IDEAS // small books

2011-08-02T12:50:00.001-04:00

by Wayne Koestenbaum

BIG IDEAS // small books / A Picador Paperback Original

Cover photographs by Jon Shireman

Wayne Koestenbaum considers the meaning of humiliation in this eloquent work of cultural critique and personal reflection.

The lives of people both famous and obscure are filled with scarlet-letter moments when their dirty laundry sees daylight. In these moments we not only witness the reversibility of “success,” of prominence, but also come to visceral terms with our own vulnerable selves. We can’t stop watching the scene of shame, identifying with it and absorbing its nearness, and relishing our imagined immunity from its stain, even as we acknowledge the universal, embarrassing predicament of living in our own bodies. With an unusual, disarming blend of autobiography and cultural commentary, noted poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum takes us through a spectrum of mortifying circumstances—in history, literature, art, current events, music, film, and his own life. His generous disclosures and brilliant observations go beyond prurience to create a poetics of abasement. Inventive, poignant, erudite, and playful, Humiliation plunges into one of the most disquieting of human experiences, with reflections at once emboldening and humane.

Alternate Comps:

HUMILIATION is not just shame hidden inside you but it's shame that is witnessed by others. Public shame.

So my initial ideas with my talented Big Idea series photographer Jon Shireman was the face covered-up from embarrassment and the Pants with pee stain. I think the rhythm of the fingers looked great but I loved the pee stain idea. Very simple and funny. But it was thought too crass for a book cover. So we went with a diary of guarded secrets that looks like someone is desperately trying to get to.

I remember one of my many public humiliation experiences that involved a Best Man speech I once gave. The night before, I took careful consideration to write down onto four pages of tightly handwritten pages every heart felt, funny anecdotes of my history with my best friend. At the reception with my moment at hand, I got up and took out my pages of notes from my tuxedo inside pocket. Everyone got to their feet and raised their glasses up high and I suddenly realized that this speech was going to be at least 5 minutes long. With everyone staring at me, I had to edit my speech down in real time. I rambled and scrambled and muttered and sputtered incoherently. Stories led nowhere, jokes weren't funny. In front of me I saw glaring faces turn from happy expectation to confusion followed by pained pity, boredom and cocktail arm strain. I finally salvaged it with the only winner I could think of, "And may they have many offsprings!" Hear, Hear! Glasses clinking. I stuck the landing. I slowly slunk backwards to the bar and tried to hide my public humiliation in a Tequila Sunrise. ouch. But I couldn't hide for long. The Bride & Groom sandwiched me in the biggest love hug of happy tears. Hey, I guess that speech wasn't THAT bad.

Humiliation Book Trailers:

An American Type

2011-07-27T12:15:00.006-04:00

by Henry Roth, author of Call It Sleep

Art Director: Ingsu Liu // W.W. Norton
Editor: Robert Weil

Jacket photograph © adoc-photos / Art Resource

The author of the greatest American immigrant novel, Call It Sleep, returns with this posthumous work.

Henry Roth’s final novel, An American Type, is nothing short of a miracle, a lyrical work of immense poignancy from a writer whose biographical story has no parallel in American literature. Roth, best known for his towering immigrant novel Call It Sleep, emerged from a literary hibernation of 60 years in 1994 with Mercy of a Rude Stream, a fictional quartet that would be hailed by as “a landmark of the American literary century.” In contrast to Roth’s previous novels, An American Type is a both a love story and a lamentation, the final fruit of nearly 2,000 unpublished pages that Roth composed in the last years of his life. The manuscript rested undisturbed in an office file for over a decade before it was sent to Willing Davidson, then a young assistant in the Fiction Department of The New Yorker, who with a “growing sense of discovery and elation,” recognized that this unpublished manuscript possessed “astonishing vigor.”

Set in the dire year of 1938, the novel reintroduces us to Roth’s alter-ego, Ira Stigman, a 32-year-old novelist, eager to assimilate but psychologically traumatized by the scars of his impoverished immigrant past. Restless with his older lover and literary mentor, the renowned English professor, Edith Welles, whose obsessive love has crippled him, Ira, a “slum-born Yiddle,” journeys to Yaddo, the famed writer’s colony, where he meets a blond, aristocratic pianist, whose inherent nobility and “calm, Anglo-Saxon radiance” engages him.

The ensuing romantic crisis, as well as the conflict between his ghetto Jewish roots and the bourgeois comforts of Manhattan, forces Ira to abandon the comforts of his paramour’s Greenwich Village apartment. In his relentless search to become a writer, a husband and an American, Ira heads West with an illiterate, boorish Communist, on an illusory quest for the promise of the American West. Thumbing rides from gruff truckers, riding the rails with hobos through the Dust Bowl, Ira explores America’s inherent splendors and its Depression tragedies as he returns home, uncertain if he will marry M., questioning if he’ll ever be able to make anything of his lapidary prose.

Set against crumbling piers and glimmering skyscrapers in Manhattan, against seedy motor courts and tufted palm trees in sun-soaked Los Angeles, An American Type is not only, perhaps, the last first-hand testament of the Depression, but also a universal statement about the constant reinvention of American identity, and, with its lyrical ending, the transcendence of love.

Looking across Central Park South. Sigh, so beautiful.

Alternate comps:

I had designed two of his previous titles for Picador back in 1994. 1994?! Yikes!.
Both shot by Grace Huang Photography:

Mercy of a Rude Stream

and A Diving Rock on the Hudson

Call It Sleep.
Photograph by the lovely & talented Christine Rodin, who sadly passed away.

The Subject Steve

2011-04-01T12:01:00.004-04:00

by Sam Lipsyte // Picador

Yes, I designed this ALL in COMIC SANS

Meet Steve (not his real name), a Special Case, in truth a Terminal Case, and the eponymous antihero of Sam Lipsyte’s first novel. Steve has been informed by two doctors that he is dying of a condition of unquestioned fatality, with no discernible physical cause. Eager for fame, and to brand the new plague, they dub it Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome, or PREXIS for short. Turns out, though, Steve’s just dying of boredom.The Subject Steve is a dazzling debut—by turns manic, ebullient, and exquisitely deadpan—Sam Lipsyte is in company with the master American satirists.

I'M COMIC SANS, ASSHOLE! by Mike Lacher

Welcome to the Comic Sans Café, the online Comic Sans type specimen and information resource.

Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

2011-01-25T12:30:00.003-05:00

by Wesley Stace // A Picador Paperback Original

England, 1923. A gentleman critic named Leslie Shepherd tells the macabre story of a gifted young composer, Charles Jessold. On the eve of his revolutionary new opera’s premiere, Jessold murders his wife and her lover, and then commits suicide in a scenario that strangely echoes the plot of his opera---which Shepherd has helped to write. The opera will never be performed.

Shepherd first shares his police testimony, then recalls his relationship with Jessold in his role as critic, biographer, and friend. And with each retelling of the story, significant new details cast light on the identity of the real victim in Jessold’s tragedy.

This ambitiously intricate novel is set against a turbulent moment in music history, when atonal sounds first reverberated through the concert halls of Europe, just as the continent readied itself for war. What if Jessold’s opera was not only a betrayal of Shepherd, but of England as well?

Wesley Stace has crafted a dazzling story of counter-melodies and counter-narratives that will keep you guessing to the end.

A wonderfully layered novel with lot of plot pieces that could easily lead to a kitchen sink design approach. In order to rein it in, I needed to reduce it to its essential story elements:
1. Three intertwining main characters (Love Triangle)
2. Music (English specifically) and
3. Mystery (Historical)

I thought using an 8th Note Triplet musical note would be a nice symbol to suggest a story of three linked characters. And printing it on an aged distressed letter to say historical setting. But I needed to bring out the music aspect more so using sheet music came to mind.

I originally started with the classic Schirmer's Library Piano Sheet Music:

But I was informed that Schirmer's sheet music was not accurate for a novel about English music. A rival sheet music library, Edition Peters would be a better choice. The author's mother sent me several JPEGs of her music collection as reference.

A few had wonderful typographic solutions to possibly play off on:

But I went with this one because I had enough elements and wanted to keep my cover simple:

I didn't want to lift their look exactly so I found a similar frame in one of my favorite copyright-free Dover book of frames and borders, BORDERS, FRAMES AND DECORATIVE MOTIFS: from the 1862 Derriey Typographic Catalog by Charles Derriey:

I overlaid the design on some burnt sheets of paper to give it a sense of distress and foul play. To give the faux cover some added depth, I used snippets of the music score composed expressly for this novel underneath. Bar 140 specifically because of the line "the victim." Although in the final design, the lyrics were covered up.

Opening title page of the score, "On Murder, Considered as a Fine Art: a suite for soprano with harpsichord, flute and cello" by Wesley Stace/Thomas De Quincey:

Bar 135-140:

Previous Directions
An Old Love Letter:

A Musical Score:

Damaged by Bullet Holes:

Final full Paperback Cover with French Flaps:

Eugene Mirman's hilarious interview with Wesley Stace for Picador Paperbacks:

My First Printed Cover Design: The High School Yearbook

2010-12-21T15:00:00.002-05:00

Designer Extraordinaire John Gall has a post on his SPINE OUT blog of some of the cool Yearbook covers he found while doing research for his children's school "graphics" project.

This reminded me of when I was on my high school yearbook committee.
I was responsible for designing the Yearbook Cover and the section dividers. Other than the elaborate covers that I put more effort in than the one-paragraph long book reports I wrote, and for extra credit that I never received, or the mimeographed choir assembly programs created in my young artist career in grammar school, I think this is my first printed book cover. Complete with foil and deep emboss on a leatherette case. And Done on Spec. Pro Bono. Although I wasn't aware of a field called "Graphic Design". I just saw this all as illustration.
I was in the class of '83. Not as interesting as the ominous "1984" just coming over the horizon. The committee came up with our big thought-provoking theme. REFLECTIONS. The unknown future gave us lots to think about. But not enough for a concept. Think "Reflections." Hmmm. a-HA! Mirrors! You know. Because they reflect. Brilliant! Jacket meetings were so much easier back then.

My high school yearbook:

It's funny to see so many graphic elements present themselves here so early on that still show up in my work now.
Block lettering. Type in Perspective, Frames. And nostalgia brown.
Ugh. I. am. such. A hack.

I read somewhere that all artist have three ideas that truly interest them in life. And everything they create is a variation and exploration of those three ideas. Hmm, something to reflect upon.

My Grammar school Choir program Design:

Check out the calligraphy, stacked type, alternating colors and curved musical staff. I'm just brimming with brilliant ideas.

And here's an interview with Gall In His Own Words:

FAME: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity

2010-10-05T15:21:00.008-04:00

by Tom Payne // Picador

Cover illustration by Alan Dingman

In this erudite, acidly funny book, Tom Payne discovers in the constellation of our celebrity culture distinct parallels between the immortals of Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides, and the glittery personalities in your copy of People magazine.

We may treat celebrities like deities, but that doesn’t mean we worship them with deference. Is it possible that humanity, from pre-history to the present, has possessed a primal urge to first exalt the famous, and to then sacrifice them? Are there similarities between the rise and fall of Michael Jackson and the ancient Greek practice of Ostracism, between Tiger Woods and Achilles, Farrah Fawcett and St. Felicity, Heath Ledger and Dr. Faustus? From Greek mythology to the stories of Christian martyrs, Payne makes the fascinating argument that our relationship to celebrity is perilous, and that we wouldn’t have it any other way.

In this brilliant book, Payne brings new life to the past and all of the characters from your high school literature class. Here the most ephemeral reality television stars (the “famous for being famous”) occupy the same VIP lounge as the characters of The Iliad, and Payne shows that the people we choose as our heroes and villains throughout the ages says much about ourselves.

A dazzling and often hilarious look at the mortals, and the immortals—us and them.

To show that the obsession with the "famous" is not a new thing. My initial idea was to bridge a fame-obsessed society and their adoration of classical gods with a modern take of the goddess Athena dogged or posing for ancient camera-wielding paparazzo:

Alan's sketch:

Two Papa-paparazzi layout approaches:

Funny, but it was probably too anachronistic.

This cover of Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY is one of my favorite because of the beautiful spot illustration of Pegasus and Bellerophon/Perseus starkly silhouetted against black.

The layout on this edition is not as interesting but the art is better represented here:

It inspired this simpler direction with Athena on a stylized Hollywood Walk of Fame:

Alan's SKETCHES:

The simplicity of this idea won out but with Athena illustrated and placed over the orange pottery background.

Hamilton's cover was also in the back of my mind when I designed this rejected cover for Jeffrey Eugenides' MIDDLESEX.

Photo-illustration by Marc Yankus

PEGASUS PWNS UNICORNS!

The Flooded Earth

2010-08-18T11:30:00.004-04:00

by Peter D. Ward

Art Director: Nicole Caputo // Basic Books

Renowned paleontologist Peter Ward tells why the effects of sea-level rise from global warming will be more profound than you think—and how humanity will adapt.

Sea level rise will happen no matter what we do. Even if we stopped all carbon dioxide emissions today, the seas would rise one meter by 2050 and three meters by 2100. This--not drought, species extinction, or excessive heat waves--will be the most catastrophic effect of global warming. And it won't simply redraw our coastlines--agriculture, electrical and fiber optic systems, and shipping will be changed forever. As icebound regions melt, new sources of oil, gas, minerals, and arable land will be revealed, as will fierce geopolitical battles over who owns the rights to them.
In "The Flooded Earth," species extinction expert Peter Ward describes in intricate detail what our world will look like in 2050, 2100, 2300, and beyond--a blueprint for a foreseeable future. Ward also explains what politicians and policymakers around the world should be doing now to head off the worst consequences of an inevitable transformation.

I originally designed this with just the Manhattan skyline under water but I was asked to adapt the concept to put across that this is a Global event. So I included San Francisco's Transamerica building and Paris' Eiffel Tower. I like it, although the final kinda looks like Las Vegas is under water.

Various comps:

As you can see, the shocking twist ending written by Rod Serling for the Planet of the Apes left a big impression on me growing up:

Choice: BIG IDEAS // small books

2010-04-22T11:11:00.012-04:00

by Renata Salecl
BIG IDEAS // small books / A Picador Paperback Original

Photographs by Jon Shireman

The essential idea is that choice, which we’d always thought of as the great prize of free markets and free societies, can become a paralyzing burden when there’s too much of it. Renata Salecl argues that in the developed world we’re told that we can choose everything about who we are, how we live, what we buy, how we look, down to the last detail. But that’s too much choice; we lose our sense of who we are and we don’t know how to make those choices, so we end up choosing them based on other people’s expectations or other outside forces—so in the end there’s nothing very personal about all this personal choice

To illustrate the concept of quantity of choices over quality of choices, I thought of playing off the pun "A needle in a haystack" with finding a needle in a needle stack. Overwhelmed by too many meaningless same choices.
Another approach was the idea of having to choose between two glasses that are either equally half full or half empty. Because in the end, it really doesn't matter which glass you agonize over and eventually choose, they're really both the same and you get out of it what you make of it. Jon did a fantastic job visualizing these ideas.

It doesn't happen too often that I love both solutions equally. But unfortunately we at Picador, for whatever reasons, chose not to publish this title for our BIG IDEAS // small books series. So I'll never have to make a choice and I get to choose both. But if this was published, the editor picked the two glasses. Both half full of course.

Hotel Iris

2010-03-10T13:04:00.006-05:00

by Yoko Ogawa // A Picador Paperback Original

• An AIGA's 50 Books // 50 Covers Best Cover 2010 Selection

A tale of twisted love, from the author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor

In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for.

The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.

Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love.

A creepier book than her other titles. We wanted it to have a dark, David Lynch tone to it. Off-centered and living in the shadows. The author's two previous novels had a dominant blue palette so I wanted to carry that through. Good thing the title had the word "IRIS" in it. I shifted the color balance to an overall violet tone and enclosed the scene in darkness on the edges to form a circular iris like a fade to black. The ferryboat came from a photo I took from my trip to Block Island, RI.

An earlier approach that wasn't menacing enough:

American Photo Magazine: A Collaboration with Marc Yankus & Phil Pascuzzo

2010-03-03T11:30:00.001-05:00

An article discussing my collaboration with photographer Marc Yankus and illustrator Philip Pascuzzo on the cover design of Burnt Shadows appeared in the March/April 2010 issue of American Photo magazine.

FOCUS | SIDE BY SIDE - Cover Story: A photographer and art director capture the essence of a book in a single image.

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

Venus Drive

2010-02-17T11:00:00.000-05:00

by Sam Lipsyte / Picador

An intense, mordantly funny collection of short fiction from the author of Home Land and The Ask.

A man with an "old soul" finds himself at a Times Square peep show, looking for more than just a little action. A young man goes into some serious regression after finding his deceased mother’s stash of morphine. A group of summer-camp sadists return to the scene of the crime. Sam Lipsyte’s brutally funny narratives tread morally ambiguous terrain, where desperate characters stumble over hope, or sometimes merely stumble. Written with ferocious wit and surprising empathy, Venus Drive is a potent collection of stories from "a wickedly gifted writer" (Robert Stone).

The Picador paperback edition includes an excerpt from The Ask.

The Autobiography of an Execution

2010-02-01T12:00:00.003-05:00

by David R. Dow

Art Director: Anne Twomey // Twelve Books - Grand Central Publishing

Cover photograph by Henry Sene Yee Photography

As a lawyer, David R. Dow has represented over 100 death row cases. Many of his clients have died. Most were guilty. Some might have been innocent. The Autobiography of an Execution is his deeply personal story about justice, death penalty, and a lawyer’s life.

It is a chronicle of a life lived at paradoxical extremes: Witnessing executions and then coming home to the loving embrace of his wife and young son, who inquire about his day. Waging moral battles on behalf of people who have committed abhorrent crimes. Fighting for life in America’s death penalty capital, within a criminal justice system full of indifferent and ineffectual judges. Racing against time on behalf of clients who have no more time.

Ain't no sunshine when they're gone.

Initial concept sketches:

Behind the Book:

The photo came from a series I shot called:

SUN ON.

SUN OFF.

These photographs and a few more of mine appear in The Graphic Eye: Photographs by Graphic Designers from around the Globe by Stefan G. Bucher

Bottom photograph by Karen Horton. As seen being sold at Urban Outfitters

A Wall in Palestine

2010-01-28T12:20:00.006-05:00

by René Backmann / A Picador Paperback Original

Cover photograph by © REINHARD KRAUSE / Reuters / Corbis

• A 2011 PRINT Magazine Regional Design Annual Winner
• An AIGA's 50 Books // 50 Covers Best Cover 2010 Winner
• Praise from Daniel Wagstaff @ The Casual Optimist Blog

The West Bank Barrier is expected to be completed in 2010. Declared illegal by the United Nations International Court of Justice, this network of concrete walls, trenches, and barbed-wire fences could permanently redraw one of the most disputed property lines in the Middle East—the Green Line that separates Israel and the West Bank. To Israel the “security fence” is intended to keep Palestinian terrorists from entering its territory. But to Palestinians the "apartheid wall" that sliced through orchards and houses, and cuts off family members from one another, is a land grab.

In this comprehensive book, Backmann not only addresses the barrier's impact on ordinary citizens, but how it will shape the future of the Middle East. Though it promises security to an Israeli population weary of terrorism, it also is responsible for the widespread destruction of Palestinian homes and farmland; with its Byzantine checkpoint regulations, it has also severely crippled the Palestinian economy; and, most urgent, the barrier often deviates from the Green Line, appropriating thousands of acres of land, effectively redrawing the boundary between the West Bank and Israel.

Backmann interviews Israeli policy makers, politicians, and military personnel, as well as Palestinians living throughout the West Bank, telling the stories not only of the barrier’s architects, but also of those who must reckon with it on a day-to-day basis on the ground.

With bold, brilliant, and often impassioned reportage, A Wall in Palestine renders the West Bank Barrier—its purpose, its efficacy, its consequences—as no book before.

The mechanical had already been typeset and ready to go to the printers when the editor told me that he received a ton of great quotes. Could I fit them all on the back-ad? Sometimes trying to redesign, cram and reflow so much copy into a single centered text column can be a huge last minute annoyance. It wasn't fitting so I thought I could break down the copy into easier to read chunks by splitting them into two columns. But I saw that four flush-left thinner columns would echo the vertical Wall segments on the front cover. I staggered the column heights and added a 1/2 point thick black rule separating the columns to further echo the front cover. I love text copy!

Original type treatment before I was struck by inspiration:

The Draining Lake

2010-01-20T12:26:00.005-05:00

by Arnaldur Indridason // Picador

Cover photograph by Laura Hanifin

Inspector Erlendur returns in this international Bestseller

Following an earthquake, the water level of an Icelandic lake suddenly falls, revealing a skeleton. Inspector Erlendur's investigation takes him back to the Cold War era, when bright, left-wing students in Iceland were sent to study in the "heavenly state" of Communist East Germany. Teaming with spies and informants, though, their "heavenly state" becomes a nightmare of betrayal and murder. Brilliantly weaving international espionage and a chilling cold case investigation, The Draining Lake is Arnaldur Indriason at his best.

NORDIC DETECTIVES ARE HOT!!!
An article appeared in The Wall Street Journal discussing The growing appeal of Scandinavian crime fiction; existential malaise and bad coffee.

Wandering Souls

2009-12-17T12:04:00.002-05:00

by Wayne Karlin

Art Director: Nicole Caputo // Nation Books / Perseus Books

On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer R. Steedly, Jr., shot and killed a North Vietnamese soldier, Dam, when they met on a jungle trail. Steedly took a diary—filled with beautiful line drawings—from the body of the dead soldier, which he subsequently sent to his mother for safekeeping. Thirty-five years later, Steedly rediscovers the forgotten dairy and begins to confront his suppressed memories of the war that defined his life, deciding to return to Viet Nam and meet the family of the man he killed to seek their forgiveness. Fellow veteran and award-winning author Wayne Karlin accompanied Steedly on his remarkable journey. In Wandering Souls he recounts Homer’s movement towards a recovery that could only come about through a confrontation with the ghosts of his past—and the need of Dam’s family to bring their child’s “wandering soul” to his own peace. Wandering Souls limns the terrible price of war on soldiers and their loved ones, and reveals that we heal not by forgetting war’s hard lessons, but by remembering its costs.

For freelance clients, I'm just required to design the front and spine and the rest is handled in-house. If I have time, I try to design the entire package. But this time I was swamped. Alyssa Stepien, Nicole's Design Assistant, did a great job taking my design and reinterpreting it for the entire package. Thanks Alyssa.

Alternate sketches:

Think Twice

2009-12-14T15:29:00.003-05:00

by Michael J. Mauboussin

Art Director: Stephani Finks // Harvard Business Press

Usually I'm walking on thin ice when my type is illegible. But in this case, illegibility was used to make the reader read / think twice.

Alternate takes:

Bloodbrothers

2009-12-11T15:34:00.007-05:00

by Richard Price // Picador

Cover photograph by Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos

Eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco has to make a choice: either join his father in the tightly knit world of New York's construction unions or take off and find his own path. But Stony’s family is not about to make that choice easy. As he tries to protect his little brother, Albert, from their dangerously unbalanced mother, and to postpone the difficult adult responsibilities that await him, he finds hope in a job working with children at a hospital--a job that promises not to make anyone happy but Stony.

Richard Price's Bloodbrothers is a soulful and often profane story of working-class life in the Bronx, and one young man's bruising initiation into adulthood.

Early Sketches focusing on Co-Op City:

Clockers

2009-12-11T13:35:00.007-05:00

by Richard Price // Picador

Cover photograph © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos

EDITOR COVER BRIEF:

CLOCKERS by Richard Price

Description:

Rocco Klein is a Dempsy, NJ homicide detective six months from retirement in the opening pages of Clockers. Dempsy, NJ is a lost, desolate place, full of slums hemorrhaging drugs, specifically crack. Strike, the second main character, is the crack dealer. He overseas his host of minions—his clockers—but not without undue stress. His profession makes him nervous and he doubts whether it is truly for him. His boss, the drug kingpin Rodney Little, sees it another way. This sets the stage for the event that catapults Rocco Klein and Strike toward each other. A murder occurs outside a fast food restaurant. Instead of Strike stepping forward, his brother, Victor, admits guilt claiming he did it in self defense. Klein of course does not buy the confession and the pursuit of Strike and Rodney Little begins.

The story is told from the perspectives of both Rocco Klein and Strike, alternating chapters as the novel moves through the grime and grit of slummy NJ. Each character has a distinct view of the world they live in. On the whole, this lets Price create two different worlds within one, a layered city, with each layer utterly connected.

I’d have to say this book is geared toward a predominantly male audience.

The tone is desperate and violent. Every line spoken, every description suggests violence in one way or another. “The New York skyline had begun to bruise purple.”
The language is aggressive and direct. Everything is meant to cut someone else in some way, emotionally, physically. It’s a hard environment and Price paints the picture of Armageddon, the last days over Dempsy, NJ.

Compare this book to all the gritty cop dramas that were once good. NYPD Blue in its beginning days. The Wire (which Price writes for). It’s smart and fast paced. Homicide: A Year in the Killing Streets by David Simon

The language is what makes this book different. Price’s prose clips along. Every character is cunning or done for, and there is a clear line between both. The crack dealers he is portraying are smart, know the game, know the cops, know their clientele. The cops know the clockers, and watch the city and its dismal surroundings, like crooks themselves.

Notable imagery: Strike drinks vanilla Yoo-hoo to nurse and calm his ailing stomach.
Handcuffs. The slums, the endless maze of brick housing projects. The corners, parking lots and concrete yards where clockers know to set up shop. Police interrogation rooms. Crack viles. Beepers or pagers.

Early Sketches:

The Sixties: BIG IDEAS // small books

2009-12-10T11:30:00.009-05:00

by Jenny Diski
BIG IDEAS // small books / A Picador Paperback Original

A brilliant, alternative take on 1960's swinging London, Jenny Diski offers radical reconsiderations of the social, political, and personal meaning of that turbulent era.

What was Jenny Diski doing in the 1960's? A lot: Dropping out, taking drugs, buying clothes, having sex, demonstrating, and spending time in mental hospitals. Now, as Diski herself turns sixty years old, she examines what has been lost in the purple haze of nostalgia and selective memory of that era, what endures, and what has always been the same. From the vantage point of London, she takes stock of the Sexual Revolution, the fashion, the drug culture, and the psychiatric movements and education systems of the day. What she discovers is that the ideas of the sixties often paved the way for their antithesis, and that by confusing liberation and libertarianism, a new kind of radicalism would take over both in the UK and America. Witty, provocative, and gorgeously written, Jenny Diski promises to feed your head with new insights about everything that was, and is, the sixties.

Once you create a series look, you can get handcuffed by it.
For the BIG IDEAS // small books series, photographer Jon Shireman and I had set up a single image conceptual approach, stripped down to its visual essence with a limited color palette around the conceit that the book itself was physically experiencing the BIG IDEA of that book.
This book was not about the 60s as it was experienced in America but in England. So I had to find some way to distinguish this aspect. Without the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War to draw upon, I saw that 60s London was more about external cultural changes. Mod fashion styles, ala Austin Powers. I did some research on Mod culture, Carnaby Street fashions, groovy industrial designs, tie-dye, abstract trippy art and saw that all of those approaches demanded an explosion of colors. Which was a possible problem. This direction might be too colorful to fit in with the established look of the series.

I needed to say UK and the Mod culture of the 60s. I thought of taking the British Flag aka The Union Jack, and tie dyeing it would be a smart combination of the two. Jon had an all-white flag created from cloth and we experimented with just using the flag's blue and red colors. But it wasn't working as well as I thought and there was too much color scattered all around.

Maybe if I tried breaking it into segments to contain the colors. But it still wasn't clicking. BOLLOCKS!

Forget the tie-dye and work in a peace sign instead.

PISS POOR Attempt!

Maybe a more graphic approach. I tried to find relationship patterns between the angles of the peace sign and Union Jack. For a good moment I thought this would be it!

But no. BLOODY AWFUL!

Maybe I should go full out and just commit to using a multi-colored tie-dye pattern to make it recognizable:

BLIMEY! It was too much color and breaking away from the series look. And they all abandoned the simple and original conceit that the books were experiencing the author's idea.

Jon and I brainstormed some more and ended our conversation with absolutely no ideas or direction. We decided to talk again at a later date when minds were fresh. So I hung up and stepped out of my office door and then it hit me. BUTTONS! Growing up in the 80s and hanging out in the East Village of NYC, it was the style to personalize our jackets with objects of our affection/affectation. Our jackets were covered with favorite band logos, bandanas, patches, safety pins, store buttons like CANAL JEANS, FLIP and Trash and Vaudeville and hand-painted back panels and sleeves. I thought that this would allow me to include many of the eclectic ideas of the 60s by representing them in a button and pining it on a clean white Union Jack. e.g. model Jean Shrimpton, peace sign, rock music, drug use, paisley. I saw plenty of 60s political button art but they probably didn't use buttons like this in their 60s fashion. But still, I like that this approach kept the monochromatic color scheme of the series. Maybe the flag could be a white denim jacket. And used colors only as added dashes of accents. I also liked that it was applied onto the flag and removable. Implying that these were fashionable trends of the moment that you can pick and choose and add to yourself and remove when you were over it. I'm not sure if this is the best solution but I was glad I was able to bend the visual closer to the series original intent and tone.

The Value of Nothing

2009-12-02T13:00:00.014-05:00

by Raj Patel // A Picador Paperback Original

"A deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness." —Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine

Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system.

If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common.

This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society.

Arun Gupta: You contend that the actual price of a $4 Big Mac should be $200. What are the real costs of that hamburger?
Raj Patel: The Center for Science and Environment in India tried a few years ago to figure out the true cost of a hamburger. Assuming that it was raised on pasture that was once rainforest, the ecological services provided by that rainforest, the loss of diversity, carbon sequestration, water cycling, fuel and tropical product sources, among many other things, the cost would come to $200. The U.S. food industry has huge hidden costs, from the agricultural run-off that causes a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico to the cultural destruction wrought by the “Western” diet. There are also huge health costs associated with poor diet — in 2007, $174 billion was spent in the U.S. caring for people with diabetes — as well as the public funds that support the industrial food system.

Cheap food is “cheat food.” There are all kinds of costs that are externalized from the price we pay at the checkout. We pay those costs one way or another — but the food companies don’t. Merely having a system of free markets with accurate prices still doesn’t address the underlying issues of poverty and disenfranchisement.

—from The Ideology of Hope: An Interview with Raj Patel
By Arun Gupta | From the November 20, 2009 issue of The Indypendent

The hamburger analogy was my original approach. The concept was to show the hidden cost of a hamburger. When you bite into it, you're contributing to the cost of land, transportation, fuel, global warming, heart disease, health care cost, etc. I thought a burger made out of representative icons of all of these cost areas sandwiched between hamburger buns would put the idea across. I also used bright colors to suggest fast food.

Initial concept sketch:

To make a quick mock up of my concept for presentation, I used the icons from the poster of Gary Hustwit's documentary OBJECTIFIED.

{ My signed postcard by Gary when I saw him and his documentary at the IFC Center.}

I hired illustrator Daniel Pelavin to flesh out my idea. These were still in initial sketch stage:

My Publisher liked it but thought it was emphasizing too much on one specific part of the book. I was asked to broaden the idea to bring to the forefront the economic aspects of the book and somehow show the vague idea of "value". And it had a "call to action". More big poster and immediate in feel. Hmmm. I decided to illustrate the title. Making "Nothing" out of "Something." A BIG FAT ZERO made up of phrases and World currency symbols. To further the idea of "nothing", I planned on blind embossing the letters so that it was black on black. I imagined the texture looking like a garlic/ginger grater. I set the type at a very small 4 points to form a smoother zero. But it was difficult to read and the blind emboss would never read on Amazon. So I simplified it to just using the US "$", increased the point size and dropped the idea of blind embossed and printed the letters in silver ink. The final cover prints in super glossy lamination with 2 hits of dense, rich black; metal tone silver ink for the small type and uses one of my favorite bright printing colors:

Lime Green PMS 375.

Earlier comps when the tentative title was ANTON'S BLINDNESS

This idea was to put price tags/values on things that were considered priceless and not for sale. The sun, sky, trees. But I couldn't make the tags work in an elegant way. I also tried a barcode but got bored of that approach.

ANTON'S BLINDNESS is a neurological condition in which loss of sight is accompanies by an insistence and a belief that the patient can see. One of the key symptoms is the complicated confabulations needed to explain accidents that result of in fact being blind. We are like those patients in our blind belief in the free market and its accomplice prices. Why even now are we making complicated excuses for the failure of free market capitalism? As we witness the continuing financial and economic crisis, economist and activist Raj Patel asks us to consider why things cost what they do, and how we reclaim both the market and democracy.

Book trailer:

NurtureShock

2009-11-18T11:00:00.007-05:00

by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman

Art Director: Anne Twomey // Twelve Books - Grand Central Publishing

The central premise of this book is that many of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring – because key twists in the science have been overlooked.

For some jobs, it can take a while to come up with an idea that you think is worth pursuing. Exploring endless ideas and directions with many, many variations both broad and minute. But sometimes you get a job where you know exactly what you want to do before the client is done with their intro brief. That was the case when Art Director Anne Twomey called me to discuss a new book on the subject of how we were raising kids all wrong by over praising them. I recalled reading a New York Magazine about this very subject. It turned out that the same authors wrote it. Over praising your child either develops high self-esteem and encourages them to strive higher. Or sets them up for failure. The authors use science to back up their claim that everything we thought about raising a child is working towards opposite results. Shocking!
But whatever the opposing theories are, children were seen as delicate, fragile things caught in the middle. Treating them with kid's gloves. So by the time I hung up the telephone, I knew that an egg was the perfect metaphor. A white egg set against a white background. Simple and uncluttered. And the egg should be cracked. Suggesting both its fragile nature and the beginnings of coming out of its shell and ready to come into the world. I was going to shoot this myself but decided to see what was available through stock photos. I saw golden eggs, smashed eggs and cracked eggs. But visually, the idea was starting to look a little thin to me. Especially if I wanted to have the object against white. Then I saw an egg with a band-aid on it. That was a nice element of color to focus on. The band-aid could represent the child rearing that kept things together until it was ready to hatch. Or maybe it was stunting its growth and trapping them in a shell? It also made the perfect spot to the place the title. For a book that had a lot of attention and needed a “Big Book” commercial look, I’m happy that I was able to keep the execution clean and simple.

The author's NurtureShock Blog on Newsweek.

The Happy Book :)

2009-11-05T15:00:00.006-05:00

by Rachel Kempster + Meg Leder

Art Director: Greg Avila // Sourcebooks, Inc.

THE HAPPY BOOK shows how to practice and celebrate happiness so you can find it when you really need it. Packed with creative prompts, wacky ideas, and hip activities, this is the ultimate pick-me-up. Packaged to encourage doodling and drawing, THE HAPPY BOOK has space to scribble thoughts, make lists, fill in the blanks, and paste pictures. This book is about creating a record of what makes you glad, whether that means '80s hair bands or hot chocolate with churros.

Fully interactive and customizable for each reader, THE HAPPY BOOK allows today's social networking fans an offline outlet for play. From photo scavenger hunts to cake baking to finger painting, everyone's happy formula is unique. THE HAPPY BOOK enables readers to celebrate and share whatever gives them wall-to-wall joy.

This is a happy book I designed for my friend Rachel. I'm going to put in drawings of the World Series Champion NEW YORK YANKEES. Because THAT, makes me very happy.

Earlier Sketches:

The Killing Circle

2009-10-23T11:00:00.007-04:00

by Andrew Pyper // Picador

Cover photograph by Jon Shireman

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE CRIME BOOK

Patrick Rush is a single father, unhappy with his career, devoted to his young son but haunted by the loss of his wife, when he joins a local writing group. In the candlelit studio where the circle meets, he finds one writer's work far more powerful than the others—a young woman named Angela, who writes about a girl stalked by a killer named the Sandman. But Angela's stories may be more autobiography than tall tale: soon the members of the group are being hunted by a shadowy figure resembling the Sandman, and the line between fiction and real life beings to dissolve. When his own son is taken, Patrick is forced to chase down the Sandman for himself and to discover the ending to his own terrifying story.

A sheet of writing paper with a delicate semi-circle paper-cut wound came to mind as I was talking with the editor. With a bit of blood pooling up behind it and beginning to run.

I emailed a quick, concept sketch to Jon Shireman to photograph:

And voila! With hole-punch wounds on the spine:

The Night of the Italians: Presented by The Type Directors Club

2009-10-16T15:36:00.006-04:00

Last night, I attended THE NIGHT OF THE ITALIANS. A celebration of Italian design presented by the Type Directors Club in the beautiful new SVA Theatre.

The panel discussion was moderated by Paola Antonelli and brought together a star-studded panel that featured Louise Fili, of Louise Fili Ltd., Francesco Cavalli of LeftLoft, Massimo Vignelli of Vignelli Associates and Matteo Bologna of Mucca Design.

This was one of the best talk I’ve been to. Paola was an entertaining moderator who was funny, personal, and kept things moving along.

SOME HIGHLIGHTS:

The word Fili is Italian for “Threads”, Cavalli means “Horses”, and Mucca means “Cow”.

Francesco and Matteo are both from Milan, and Massimo is from Venice.
Only Louise was born in America. New Jersey to be exact. Unlike the rest who wanted to come to America to pursue their design dreams, Louise was desperate to live in Italy. Ever since the time she first visited with her family at the age of 16. Because of her yearning for the culture roots of her parents, she embraced all things Italian and was influenced by its aesthetics. Her design reflects the most typically “Italian” of the four there.

But they all admitted that although Italy is a great place to be, they could not work there.

Most left Italy for greater opportunity. Masimo left because the ceiling was too low there. He found that NYC has no ceiling when it came to realizing your creativity.
Matteo presented some typical advertisement work being done in Italy and said that THIS is the reason why you don’t want to work in Italy as a Designer. Making the transition from Italy to NYC wasn't hard to make because Milan is a very urban city and is as chaotic as NYC. But living in a city where stores and life doesn't close down for the weekend was very stimulating.

The post-Q&A section generated some very good responses from the panel.

One questioner, noticing that most of the works shown were print based, asked their thoughts on designing for the Internet. Massimo responded that BOOKS ARE DEAD! Yikes! But sadly not shocking. The printed books could only reach the amount of people that it can publish. But the Internet can reach millions around the world. Matteo added that books have had a good run at reaching people for over 500 years but in essence, has hit the ceiling. And the Internet does not have a ceiling in getting your message out. I think I need to look for another line of work.

Another question, “What is more important, the image or the copy?” was met with amused silence until Matteo answered, “The kerning.” This was a reference to Matteo's earlier remarks about his subtle redesign of the Victoria's Secret Logo, jokingly commenting, "We got paid a lot of money to do kerning."

A 4th year design student was concerned that his senior portfolio did not reflect an obvious “style” and would that be a problem for Art Directors hiring. Massimo responded that, “It’s not important to develop your own style but your approach.” To which Francesco added with no disrespect, “You are too young to develop a style.” He described our job as problem solvers and that your voice will come out on its own. Or else, you are just imitating someone else's look.

After the talk, there was Sicilian gelato served from L’Arte del Gelato for which Louise designed the logo. The line was very long and there was only one person scooping s-l-o-w-l-y. But the Stracciatella and pumpkin flavors were really delicious and worth the wait. It was great catching up with friends and the panel members were all accessible and having a great time. I love Louise. My Art Director and Mentor who taught me to be the Art Director and Designer I am today. When I’m around her, there’s a part of me that still trembles in awe. Just like how I felt when I was starting out as her design assistant at Pantheon Books. I was able to snag the event poster designed by Charles Nix. It was a fun night. The event ended with Matteo calling out to me as I was leaving. I turned and saw him flipping me the bird. Now That's Amore. Arriverderci.

Here are videos I was able to take of Louise and Matteo's presentations discussing their work and what it means to be an Italian designer:

Louise Fili-The Night of the Italians: presented by The TDC from Henry Yee on Vimeo.

Matteo Bologna-The Night of the Italians: presented by The TDC from Henry Yee on Vimeo.

(The Panel Left to Right: Louise, Francesco, Paola, Massimo and Matteo)

Louise's grandfather with her young father on the far right.

Me and Louise.

Massimo

Time: BIG IDEAS // small books

2009-10-08T19:16:00.009-04:00

by Eva Hoffman
BIG IDEAS // small books / A Picador Paperback Original

• An AIGA's 50 Books // 50 Covers Best Cover 2009 Selection

Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to the BIG IDEAS/small books series
Time has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. But these days we are tampering with time in ways that affect how we live, the textures of our experience, and our very sense of what it is to be human. What is the nature of time in our time? Why is it that even as we live longer than ever before, we feel that we have ever less of this basic good? What effects do the hyper fast technologies—computers, video games, and instant communications—have on our inner lives and even our bodies? And as we examine biology and mind on evermore microscopic levels, what are we learning about the process and parameters of human time? Hoffman regards our relationship to time—from jet lag to aging, sleep to cryogenic freezing—in this broad, eye-opening meditation on life’s essential medium and its contemporary challenges.

It’s about Time, but what aspect of time? When you have plenty of it, it never comes to mind. You only think about it when you're running out of it. That’s what I needed to think about. With deadlines approaching and running out of time, I think and let go. Sometimes after the end of a long workday, with time standing still, I stare at my wall and my mind drifts. The afternoon’s setting sun begins to cast shadows of my windowpane across my office wall.
It made me think of the long shadows of late August. That melancholy moment when you realize that summer is almost over. Where the sunlight becomes golden, hazy and lazy. That's when time makes itself known. When it tells me that moments are drifting away. Goodbye summer. That’s what time is to me. Fleeting moments.
I’ve already established this BIG IDEAS series with a minimal color palette and minimal imagery. Using a golden color would be out of place. But I was also designing another subject in the BIG IDEAS/small books series about the British SIXTIES where I needed to incorporate the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. I had to break my rules. I placed my type along the shadow's edge. The transition point that separates day from night. Interesting thing about this image is that it’s not a photograph. I didn't want to use a stock image. It seemed simple enough to photograph live. But I was designing this in the wrong time of the year, winter. So I mocked up my concept by creating it in Photoshop with Gaussian blurs and gradient masks. I did have photographer Jon Shireman shoot this as he has for all of the other in this series. But I decided to stay with my mock up because it just seemed to capture the mood I wanted. Sorry Jon. But wait till you see what we came up for the next in the series, CHOICE. I can't wait to show you.

It's a beautiful autumn here in NYC and summer's a distant memory. Replaced with apple picking, butternut squash, crisp blue skies, rustling leaves, cocktail parties, great weather for leather and dressing in layers. Hello autumn! Did you have a nice summer?

*sigh*

Last Last Chance

2009-08-04T09:45:00.005-04:00

by Fiona Maazel // Picador

An apocalyptic comic novel about a deadly outbreak of plague, reincarnation, narcotics recovery, a family in trouble, and some Norse mythology.

I was really into Marvel Comics' THE MIGHTY THOR, the god of thunder when I was growing up. And through that I was introduced to Norse mythology. I found out that Wednesday was named after Odin/Wotan, Thursday after Thor's Day and Frigg/Freya for Friday. I also learned that Earth (Midgard) is connected to the Home of the Norse Gods (Asgard) by the Rainbow Bridge (Bifröst). And at the End of the World (Ragnarök "Doom of the Gods"), the Bow Bridge would be shattered.

I thought a broken rainbow would make a great visual for this book. The end of the road, the end of a dream. Hope interrupted.
I wanted to find a sweet, sentimental vintage greeting card, full of rainbows and unicorns and then rip it up. But Thee Nay! None that was satisfying came up in my research and I moved on to a simpler approach.

Here are two versions where the rainbow broke to a black background, but the subtler approach without the black was chosen for the final:

I instead used the black for the title type to add a subtle darker, sinister tone instead of making it ethereal soft white.

Fiona Maazel, Charles Bock and Sam Lipsyte @ 2008 5 Under 35 Celebration from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Little Children's Illegitimate Children?

2009-07-27T10:39:00.000-04:00

I'm a pop culture icon! Not really. But Entertainment Weekly Magazine mentioned how my cover design for Tom Perrotta's novel Little Children with it's green lawn background inspired copycat covers.
If it's true, I'm flattered. But the kid is not my son.
Although their mock cover for Leaves of Grass IS pretty brilliant.

Cover photograph by Wendy Idele

You can read a bit about the controversy surrounding the HC edition of Little Children with its Goldfish cracker cover that I was forced to change. Which I thought was perfect for the story.

Judging Asian Americans by Our Book Covers

2009-07-15T13:15:00.007-04:00

I had a phone discussion with writer Neelanjana Banerjee of Hyphen Magazine about the use of stereotypical imagery on Asian American book covers. Above is the 3 page article. I wonder what she'll think about the jacket I did for THE SNAKEHEAD below?

JUDGING ASIAN AMERICANS BY OUR BOOK COVERS
Hyphen Magazine, Winter 2008 by Banerjee, Neelanjana

Do stereotypical images reflect bad marketing or stilted writing-or both?

YOU WOULD THINK that in the publishing world where Asian Americans have had significant mainstream success we wouldn't still be subjected to exotified marketing. Yet when I sort through the Hyphen book box at our office, I see an array of stereotypical Asian images: lotus blossoms, flowing saris, flawless Asian faces. I know I'm not supposed to judge, but I sometimes have a hard time getting past the cover to read what's inside.

This may sound like a terrible admission for a book editor that I judge Asian American books by their covers. But let me ask you: Is Asian American culture only about chopsticks, geishas, fans and dragons? Or are we simply being reduced to stereotypes that sell?

Perhaps the trend of "chinking up" book covers comes directly from the success of Asian American authors. Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts study To Read or Not to Read showed that Americans are spending less on books than at almost any other time in the past two decades. So, since books about Asian Americans tend to do well - Amy Tan's stereotype-laden The Joy Luck Club (1989) still has millions of copies in print - publishers want to mark other books in the same way: with "authentic" cultural artifacts.

This makes me wonder if the pressure on Asian American writers to be "more Asian" hasn't grown worse lately. Judging by the endless memoirs about growing up in [insert Asian country here] that come through the Hyphen office, it seems that writers are succumbing to such pressure. Could it be that the bad book cover problem stems from (gasp!) the writing itself?

Henry Sene Yee, creative director of Picador Books, says that when it comes to book cover design, everything the designer does is coming from the book. "If you are an Asian American and you are writing about 18th century China, the writer is pigeonholing themselves in a way," Yee says. "Asian writers who are only writing about the Asian experience that limits [the designer] to work[ing] with certain images."

Yee is working on the paperback cover of Don Lee's farcical novel, Wrack and Ruin, about Lydon Song a sculptor who flees New York City to be a Brussels sprouts farmer in a coastal California town, only to have his brother try to sell the land to developers who want to build a golfcourse resort. So far, Yee has a close-up image of a Brussels sprout on a golf tee.

"His book isn't just about the Asian experience or the culture," Yee insisted, "so it was easier to come up with an idea."

Yee says the publishing industry is all about recognizable codes: "Russian constructivist font for Russian books; torn paper and beige for Westerns; italics, diamond rings and legs for women's fiction," he says. "The writer is tapping into this culture; so is the designer, and so is the reader."

But Sunyoung Lee, editor of indie Asian American publishing house Kaya Press, argues that publishing houses deserve some of the blame: "Mainstream publishers typically do a terrible job of designing book covers for Asian American authors though things seem to have improved recently from where they were in the 90s."

Lee's primary example of a poorly handled book cover is the 1995 anthology On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast published by Anchor, an imprint of Doubleday. The cover features a blurry naked Asian woman on a bed, covering her private parts with a fan, with lilies in her hair and Chinese lettering printed over her body under book's English title.

But as Lee points out, it isn't just major presses making such covers. Take, for example, the Copper Canyon Press poetry book Spring Essence, published in 2000, a translation of the work of 17th century Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong. On the cover is a photograph of a naked woman holding an enormous plate over her face.

"This was particularly upsetting to me precisely because Copper Canyon is such a wonderful press, with so many amazing authors and projects on their list, including this one," Lee says. "One of the points that [translator] John Balaban makes in his intro is that there are tons of double entendres in [Ho Xuan Huong's] poetry . . . that it was far racier than you might suspect. But to try to sell a Vietnamese classical female poet a literary hero, in fact with a naked, faceless woman! It still makes my blood boil."

Lee thinks that Copper Canyon had good intentions and probably didn't think the cover would be considered offensive. "But in a way, that's precisely the problem. They don't even see what the problem might be."

Writers and readers need to take the publishing industry to task for the way it pressurizes both the content and the marketing of Asian American books. Maybe that's what it would take to shift the focus to what's most important: the writing.

Neelanjana Banerjee, Hyphen's Books Editor, is only judgmental when it comes to books, really.

Copyright Hyphen Magazine Winter 2008
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

2009-07-08T14:48:00.001-04:00

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Art Director: Emily Mahon // Doubleday
Photographer: Simon Lee

about this book
A mesmerizing narrative about the rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss

In the 1980s, a wave of Chinese from Fujian province began arriving in America. Like other immigrant groups before them, they showed up with little money but with an intense work ethic and an unshakeable belief in the promise of the United States. Many of them lived in a world outside the law, working in a shadow economy overseen by the ruthless gangs that ruled the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown.

The figure who came to dominate this Chinese underworld was a middle-aged grandmother known as Sister Ping. Her path to the American dream began with an unusual business run out of a tiny noodle store on Hester Street. From her perch above the shop, Sister Ping ran a full-service underground bank for illegal Chinese immigrants. But her real business-a business that earned an estimated $40 million-was smuggling people.

As a “snakehead,” she built a complex—and often vicious—global conglomerate, relying heavily on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs to protect her power and profits. Like an underworld CEO, Sister Ping created an intricate smuggling network that stretched from Fujian Province to Hong Kong to Burma to Thailand to Kenya to Guatemala to Mexico. Her ingenuity and drive were awe-inspiring both to the Chinatown community—where she was revered as a homegrown Don Corleone—and to the law enforcement officials who could never quite catch her.

Indeed, Sister Ping’s empire only came to light in 1993 when the Golden Venture, a ship loaded with 300 undocumented immigrants, ran aground off a Queens beach. It took New York’s fabled “Jade Squad” and the FBI nearly ten years to untangle the criminal network and home in on its unusual mastermind.

THE SNAKEHEAD is a panoramic tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground economy in which America’s twelve million illegal immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream. The Snakehead offers an intimate tour of life on the mean streets of Chinatown, a vivid blueprint of organized crime in an age of globalization and a masterful exploration of the ways in which illegal immigration affects us all.

WHERE THE SNAKEHEAD SLITHERED
Key locations from Patrick Radden Keefe's The Snakehead, which documents the rise and fall of Chinatown's immigrant-smuggling kingpin, mild-mannered Sister Ping, and its most vicious gangster, Ah Kay.
—New York magazine, July 26, 2009

Burnt Shadows

2009-06-25T11:35:00.002-04:00

by Kamila Shamsie / A Picador Paperback Original

Photo-illustration by Marc Yankus

Beginning on August 9, 1945, in Nagasaki, and ending in a prison cell in the US in 2002, as a man is waiting to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of love and betrayal.

Hiroko Tanaka is twenty-one and in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. As she steps onto her veranda, wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, her world is suddenly and irrevocably altered. In the numbing aftermath of the atomic bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new beginnings, two years later, Hiroko travels to Delhi. It is there that her life will become intertwined with that of Konrad's half sister, Elizabeth, her husband, James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu.

With the partition of India, and the creation of Pakistan, Hiroko will find herself displaced once again, in a world where old wars are replaced by new conflicts. But the shadows of history--personal and political--are cast over the interrelated worlds of the Burtons, the Ashrafs, and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York and, in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound these families together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.

The title Burnt Shadows refers to the crane shaped patterns from the protagonist's kimono that was burnt onto her back when she was exposed to the atomic blast while in Nagasaki waiting for her German officer lover. Whew. It represented a constant reminder of the world she lost and marked her as an outsider trying to find happiness but is swept up in historical events. Instead of trying to illustrate the epic scope of the story, I wanted to focus on that. But it could easily turn out looking grotesque. I needed to find a more painterly and beautiful approach to creating the image.
Marc Yankus is always dropping by my office to show me his beautiful photographs. They're more like paintings. Really stunning. I'm always looking for a project that we could work on together and this seemed perfect.

Marc had his close friend Minnie pose for him. Focusing on the back of the woman, she couldn't appear too provocative but had to appear as if she was baring her soul and her shame. A moment of intimate trust. Of the contact sheet, this shot of Minnie looked particularly vulnerable. We then looked for crane references. Most of the stock art and Dover books sources were too stiff and graphic. I wanted something more painterly and soft. I thought that kimonos would be a good bet. But oddly enough, we had a difficult time finding kimonos with the right crane patterns. We looked all over NYC. We checked kimono stores, the famous Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya, a private dealer of Japanese rare prints, the New York Public Library Picture Collection but none were right. It seemed easier to recreate it ourselves. So I hired my go to image maker Philip Pascuzzo to create a flying crane and ocean waves in the style of Japanese woodblock prints. Marc then took Phil's drawings and arranged them into his composition. The wooden bracket from a piece of Marc's furniture was added to the back cover to suggest the India portion of the story.
I kept the type solution quiet.
The gradient sky was inspired by the Japanese screen painter Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).

Illustrations by Philip Earl Pascuzzo:

An interview with author Kamila Shamsie:

Kamila Shamsie on using Google Maps to help with research for novel writing

Burnt Shadows Reading Group Guide

The Virgin Suicides

2009-06-18T10:08:00.005-04:00

by Jeffrey Eugenides / Picador

Cover photograph by Justine Kurland // Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Juxtaposing the most common and the most gothic, the humorous and the tragic, Jeffrey Eugenides creates a vivid and compelling portrait of youth and lost innocence. He takes us back to the elm-lined streets of suburbia in the seventies, and introduces us to the men whose lives have been forever changed by their fierce, awkward obsession with five doomed sisters: brainy Therese, fastidious Mary, ascetic Bonnie, libertine Lux, and pale, saintly Cecilia, whose spectacular demise inaugurates "the year of the suicides." This is the debut novel that caused a sensation and won immediate acclaim from the critics--a tender, wickedly funny tale of love and terror, sex and suicide, memory and imagination.

The cover of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which I designed with Olga Grlic, is still one of my favorite designs and favorite books. So when Picador got the rights to republish The Virgin Suicides in paperback, I was excited to get the chance to repackage it.

Great typography huh?

I absolutely loved Sofia Coppola's debut film version of the book. So it was hard not to be influenced by the look and tone of the movie. I wanted to stay away from depicting any direct scenes from the book and go with images that suggested the spirit of the writing. Jeffrey and my Publisher also wanted to go for a modern American classic look.

Working with a limited budget, commissioning a new piece would be difficult so I looked for artist that dealt with similar themes in their work. Hoping to find something in their collection that would resonate sympathetically.

Jeffrey had suggested the Dutch photographer and video artist, Rineke Dijkstra. She photographed an early series of adolescent bathers in the United States and Eastern Europe in 1992 that dealt with their discomfort over their bodies. Children who seem at odds with their own bodies as they confront puberty. I contacted her representative at the Marian Goodman Gallery and we looked over her work and selected this image entitled, "Hel, Poland, August 12, 1998". Even though it didn't have a direct link to the story, it captured the mood.

Reineke's image was gorgeous but it was decided that a young girl in a bathing suit was too far away from the book. I remembered when we were brainstorming for MIDDLESEX, Jeffrey had suggested using one of sculpture/performance/video artist Matthew Barney pieces from his Cremaster Cycle on the cover. Interesting idea because they both dealt with early moments of sexual development that represented a condition of pure potentiality. But it would just be too disconnecting to most readers.

Another photographer that I had worked with on a previous book, Serious Girls came to mind. Justine Kurland, the fine-art photographer. She first became known for a series that depicted fierce feral teenage girls running wild in nature that addressed female identity without appearing passive or seductive.
I thought she would be perfect for this.

I got in touch with Justine's gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash and asked if they had anything that would be related to the book. They were very helpful. Justine sent me two images that she thought would work.

This image entitled MIDSUMMER NIGHT:

Beautiful and appropriate. But I loved her second image entitled ORCHARD:

It wasn't depicting anything that actually happened but was a visualization of a group of young men's nostalgia for the unattainable girls of their youth. The Lisbon sisters of their memory. Below, Justine describes in an email her inspiration for the photo after I sent the comps to Jeffrey.

hi henry,

great. I hope something works out. I loved that book, and actually read it the same time I was making the girl pictures. my favorite part, which was completely missing from the movie, was the hyperbolic fantasy life of girls imagined from the point of view of the boys, forever unknowable. for that, my strongest recommendation would be "the orchard"

How about that? It was as if I commissioned her for this book. It all came together nicely in the end. My Publisher and I loved it, and so did Jeffrey and his wife. DeLUX.

A Video Conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides in The New York Times Book Review
The author discussed his celebrated novels, "The Virgin Suicides" and "Middlesex," and the decline of his hometown, Detroit, with Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review.
Jeffrey's opening words warmed my heart. :) <3

NPR: All Things Considered
Listen Now 'The Virgin Suicides': Inspired By Detroit's Woes?

Flying

2009-04-15T10:00:00.017-04:00

by Eric Kraft // A Picador Paperback Original

Cover photograph by Scott Nobles
Plane blueprint illustration on Back Cover by Philip Earl Pascuzzo

Critics have compared Eric Kraft to Proust, Pynchon, and Fred Astaire—an artful, slyly intelligent, wildly inventive observer of Americana. Now Eric Kraft has landed an ambitious comedy set both in our present and in an alternative 1950s universe—Flying.

It is the tail end of the 1950s, and in the town of Babbington, New York, a young dreamer named Peter Leroy has set out to build a flying motorcycle, using a design ripped from the pages of Impractical Craftsman magazine. This two-wheeled wonder will carry him not only to such faraway places as New Mexico and the Summer Institute in Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry, but deep into the heart of commercialized American culture, and return him to Babbington a hero. More than forty years later, as Babbington is about to rebuild itself as a theme park commemorating his historic flight, Peter must return home to set the record straight, and confess that his flight did not match the legend that it inspired.

Author Eric Kraft has always been our undiscovered gem. We had previously published over five titles in another series based around his character Peter Leroy. Like his stories, the books were packaged around retro and nostalgia. They were all Illustrated beautifully and whimsically by collage artist Marty Blake and were designed in a visually connective series format. But for some reason they didn't sell as well as we hoped. And when books don't sell, it's usually blamed on the jacket. But when they do well, the jacket had nothing to do with it. But that's another story.

All illustrations by Marty Blake // All designs by Henry Sene Yee

For his latest series Flying, it was published as a planned trilogy with the first two books already released in hardcover by St. Martin's Press. To give the books more attention, it was decided to skip the release of the third book as a hardcover and publish all three as a one volume original paperback book instead. And repackage it with a new look that didn't rely on retro and nostalgia. I wanted to strip all that away. Make it clean and take the focus off of the objects in the character's past and instead place the emphasis on the emotions of the character. The main character is a Big Dreamer. He builds a plane in his garage out of junkyard scraps and repurposed motorcycle parts until he finally takes flight and reaches for his dreams amongst the clouds...or does he?

The book made me think of the Terry Gilliam movie, BRAZIL. The visuals and the nihilistic Orwellian tones left an impression on me when I first saw it. I remembered the dream sequence where Jonathan Pryce's character escapes his oppressive life and sees himself as an armored angel flying through clouds. Up there he sees his love interest floating ethereally amongst the clouds. I thought this scene resonated with the book and man's state of mind. The images of clean, billowy clouds and blue skies. A future seen through Steampunk sensibilities.

I pictured a plane taking flight through these idealized dreamy clouds, going off page until you just see its tail section. When you followed it onto the spine and back cover, you saw that it wasn't flying, but resting on cinder blocks on a hilltop. Showing that this plane never really got off the ground. I've been wanting to work with photographer Scott Nobles for some time. While talking over the concept, the original idea of the front end of the plane resting on a hill would be difficult to visualized. The angle was wrong. It would end up looking as if it crashed into the hill instead of resting on it. Looking through Scott's website, I saw that he worked with ephemera and paper as textures in his photos. We came up with the idea that the back cover, that represented the reality, would work as a blueprint. This would also put across that it was a dream that was never realized past the planning stage. Plus, it would carry the conceptual themes from front to back. Plane to plan, blue skies with white clouds to blueprints with white lines. I decided that we could use some retro as long as we kept it to the back. Scott found some model planes online and I hired Phil Pascuzzo to create the plane schematics and it all came together nicely.

Wraparound French Flap with Rough Front Paperback:

Scott's Test Shots:

Model Plane:

Phil's Blueprint Drawing:

Scott's Alternate Clouds.

These clouds had a great mood. But I wanted them to be clumpy and tangible. I thought that would better suggest graspable dreams than an overall, even spread of puffery. And I also wanted to have some groups of clouds so that I could interact with the title type.

The Terror Dream

2009-04-08T10:30:00.008-04:00

by Susan Faludi // Picador

Illustration by Andrea Dezsö

This New York Times Op-Ed piece, America's Guardian Myth written by the author Susan Faludi explains the book better than I can.

NY Public Library Picture Collection

This was a difficult subject to package. I wanted to focus on one aspect of the book and I chose the "Heroic Cowboy" myth. Where women needed men's protection and men were able to provide it. This was the turning point where America's persona was formed. I thought using a classic John Wayne pose as a silhouette would be an arresting image. But it was determined that it wasn't saying enough of what the book was about. It had to look epic and expansive. The only way to portray the story that my Publisher wanted was to depict the entire history with multiple images. From Pre-Revolutionary America where homesteads were attacked, the women kidnapped with nothing that the men could do to protect them. To the growing myth of the cowboy savior, hopeful stories of the cowboy defeating the Indians and protecting the women, to the resurgence of that ideal in Post-9/11 America and heroic rescue of Private Lynch. But this was beginning to sound like a recipe for image/story overload.

My first device to contain all of these ideas was to create a shadow box or diorama of these scenes. Looking through them as if we were peering through history. I had recently seen the Kara Walker exhibition at the Whitney Museum and I was blown away by her animated shadow puppet films. So graphic and full of energy. I had started seeing Illustrator Andrea Dezsö work around in magazines and went to her web site. The range of her visual expression was amazing. She had the technique, style and flow that I thought would be perfect in telling this complex story in a simpler form.
I called her up and it turned out that she was already familiar with the book because she had illustrated the author's New York Times Op-Ed piece. So from the start, I felt confident about the two of us tackling this project together.
After several brainstorming discussions, we soon scrapped the idea of a dimensional picture box because it was unnecessarily complicated and decided to try this on one level.

Below are Andrea's sketches and her email comments.

Andrea: I did a layered composition where the layers represent time periods from the past (top) to the present (bottom). The top shows different versions of the "fight with the indians" story. In some scenes the cowboy is the rescuer in others the cowboy is huddling behind the tree and the woman fights.
The bottom layer refers to the Jessica Lynch rescue fiction by US
Special troops.

Me: Beautiful! But too busy and too much story to figure out. Let's edit it down and concentrate on just 3 aspects.

Andrea: (Top): women fight indians (I took the guys out from here because I wanted to concentrate on the bravery of women and show them in an unusual way as fighters also to contrast that image more with the ones where men rescue women) (Middle): Cowboy myth--cowboy rescues woman (Bottom): GIs rescue Jessica Lynch reference or the contemporary myth.
I think the images can go as one continuous block or be cut into 3 scenes however it would fit your typography better. I LOVE the stark stripped-down to the essence black and white idea:

Me: The Jessica Lynch/hospital bed story isn't coming across. I don't want to include the burning twin towers. But in the end, this was the terrible moment that President Bush used to justify his actions. So let's try fitting that in:

Me: It works, but please remove the 2nd plane.

The sketches were then photographed to suggest the original diorama box idea and to feel like a nightmare seen through a television:

Alternate comps:

Too small on the page.

Nice but too ghostly and wintery.

The final cover was printed as a 4/C over Metallic Silver Ink, PMS 877 with Glossy Film Lamination.

Authors@Google presents Susan Faludi // September 11, 2008

Designing a Book Cover: 101

2009-04-02T12:12:00.005-04:00

Designing a Book Cover-101 from Henry Yee on Vimeo.

(Click on the link DESIGNING A BOOK COVER-101 to go to the Vimeo site to view a larger, higher-res version)

Back in early 2001, I was asked to give a presentation to our Sales Department at the St. Martin's Press / Picador Sales Conference to describe very simply, what went into designing a book cover. I chose the topic of working with different types of art. Showing one example each of working with an illustrator, a photographer and creating artwork myself. Since this was done in 2001, you'll notice I made note of the use of the emerging new technologies that were starting to change the way we did things. Sketches sent to me electronically via email, Using eBay and the Internet as a source for research, taking portraits using a digital camera instead of shooting on film for instant viewing and cost savings, and retouching digitally. This was also the first time I used PowerPoint and I enjoyed working with the different ways you could transition between one element to the next to convey the story. Although in exporting the PowerPoint as a movie, I lost many of the subtle scene shifts. So I'm presenting it as is. It may be a little hard to follow without me narrating. But you'll get the general idea. I added the music to fill in the dead space.

Cover 01: DOUBLE TROUBLE by Greil Marcus / Illustrated by Steven Stines
Cover 02: TRIALS OF THE MONKEY by Matthew Chapman / Photo-illustration by Daniel Lee
Cover 03: DARLING? by Heidi Jon Schmidt / Illustrated by Henry Sene Yee
Music: POSSIBLY MAYBE by Björk / POST

Columbine

2009-03-26T16:13:00.016-04:00

by Dave Cullen

Art Director: Flamur "Flag" Tonuzi // Twelve Books - Grand Central Publishing

Photograph by: Steve Peterson / ZUMA Press

• An AIGA's 50 Books // 50 Covers Best Cover Selection
• An Art Directors Club GOLD Winner
• A Type Directors Club Winner
• An EYE Magazine / JUST ADD STOCK Winner
• A Communication Arts Design Annual Winner
• A readerville.com Most Coveted Covers Selection, No. 215
• Appeared in The Financial Times section, "How to judge a book by its cover" by David Shaftel. November 13 2009

The Original News photo:

Apr 24, 1999 - Littleton, Colorado, USA - Columbine High School Shooting: Columbine High School southwest corner shortly after shooting. Windows are boarded up from the gun fire at The Columbine High School shooting where two teenage gunmen fatally shot 12 classmates and a teacher before killing themselves, on April 20, 1999. Front area of Columbine High School where Harris and Kledblod opened fire on students and teachers.

I thought that like 9/11, this was a regular day in the life of a regular high school. I wanted to depict the banality of school life. Lockers, linoleum floor tiles, classrooms, students shuffling between classes.
At first I used stock images of school hallway:

They were looking too pretty, too much poetry. Is that possible? And I thought if I continued this approach, it wouldn't make sense if I didn't use an image from the actual Columbine high school. These comps used photos of the school's actual hallway and library:

I also had to explore using the classroom video feed taken during the shooting. But I already knew it would have been too exploitative and painful to use on the final jacket:

In the end, I didn't want to say anything or felt the need to frame the book in any Point-of-View. What really needs to be said? The Publisher had already set the tone for me. As far as the cover copy, there was no author's name, no descriptive subtitle, no high school, just the word COLUMBINE on the front cover. That said it all. So I pulled all the way out of the school's interior and used an exterior news photo of the high school that photo-researcher Laura Wyss found for me. I made it as small as I could and cropped out any distracting elements and set it low on the page. I extended the gray skies heavenward and set the title small and floating in knock out white from a light sky. The contrast was subtle. K.I.S.S. Keep It Subtle Stupid. Hopefully the dramatically haunting spareness will draw you in. The final has a matte lamination with the title in spot gloss to punch it out a little. Because you still gotta read it from across the room.
I was told that the Sales department wanted to change the type solution to make it more legible because they were worried that the cover wouldn't reproduce well in Amazon. So we just made a darker JPEG version for the web. Talk about the tail wagging the dog. But thankfully the Publishers loved it just the way it was. Me too.

This is the second book cover I designed for Grand Central Publisher's new TWELVE imprint. The first being The Man Who Wanted Everything: Michael Ovitz and the Dark Dreams of Hollywood. And BOTH have won the Type Directors' Club Award for typographic excellence. How suh-WEET is that? Big thanks goes to the Creative Director Anne Twomey and my Art Director Flamur "Flag" Tonuzi. Although I've known Flag for years since we went to NYC's School of Visual Arts/SVA together, this was the first time we've worked together.

Here's Flag with a head of hair during Senior Year in the Design Workshop of SVA showing off some kind of big conceptual thingy design:

My Art Directors Club Winner GOLD Cube:

Photographed by Keith Hayes

2009 New York Book Show Winner

2009-03-25T10:00:00.003-04:00

I am pleased to announce that the Picador Art Department had some winning entries in the 2009 New York Book Show in the category of

General Trade / Quality Paperback for Individual Book Cover Design:

SECOND PLACE COVER:
John Lydon's ROTTEN // Picador

THIRD PLACE COVER:
Yoko Ogawa's THE DIVING POOL // Picador

MERIT AWARD COVER:
Slavoj Zizek's VIOLENCE // Picador

And one of my freelance jobs for Twelve / Grand Central Publishers, Art Directed by Flamur Tonuzi.
In the category of General Trade / Hardcover Nonfiction for Individual Book Jacket Design:

SECOND PLACE JACKET:
Dave Cullen's COLUMBINE // Twelve / Grand Central Publishers

I'll post more about this cover soon.

Atmospheric Disturbances

2009-03-18T12:00:00.009-04:00

by Rivka Galchen / Picador

A man's wife disappears. In her place a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her. A simulacrum. He loves her but he won't be fooled. He knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that his real wife is alive and in hiding, he embarks on a idealistic journey to reclaim her. With the help of a man who believes himself to be a secret agent and is able to control the weather. He discovers that this man has developed a meteorological technique to verify that this woman is an impostor by using Doppler Radar technology. To prove once and for all that she's the "Dopplerganger" that he believes she is.

My original concept was to create a portrait of the woman out of Doppler Radar images. But it wasn't resonating with anyone. It was told that it was important to put across the idea of a duplicated person on the cover and to not make it too colorful. Back to the keyboard with the mechanical late for the printers.
The final design was born out of restrictions and deadlines. The character in the book is described as having blonde hair with bangs. Most of the woman images I found in stock were too posed. I photographed some of my co-workers faces. But the author liked the eyes on my original image. But everything else about her was incorrect. Her hair was the wrong color. So the only portion of her entire face that I could really use was just her eye. The author also liked this Doppler effect. WIth no time to see if I could retouch her dark hair into a blond, I instead cropped tight into the eye, placed it in the center of the circular rings (And NO, it wasn't die-cut. Limited budget. But I don't think it needed it). It was interesting but I still needed to convey the twin aspect so I duplicated it, flopped it, colored it and overlaid it to create tension between the two. So out of desperation with limitations and time came this solution.
I liked that I was able to keep it clean and work with basically two simple objects.

P.S. This is my very first design created and printed entirely from an Adobe InDesign mechanical. It's amazing. It looks exactly like Quark.

Doppler Effect:

Other Concepts:

The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture

2009-03-12T11:17:00.001-04:00

by Tilman Allert // Picador

Sometimes the smallest detail reveals the most about a culture. In The Hitler Salute, sociologist Tilman Allert uses the Nazi transformation of a simple human interaction--the greeting--to show how a shared gesture can usher in the conformity of an entire society. Made compulsory in 1933, the Hitler salute developed into a daily reflex in a matter of months, and became the norm in schools, at work, among friends, and even at home. Adults denounced neighbors who refused to raise their arms, and children were given tiny Hitler dolls with movable right arms so they could practice the salute. And, of course, each use the greeting invested Hitler and his regime with a divine aura.

The first examination of a phenomenon whose significance has long been underestimated, The Hitler Salute offers new insight into how the Third Reich's rituals of consent paved the way for the wholesale erosion of social morality.

I wanted to avoid obvious Nazi imagery on the cover. I was able to find this crowd of smiling grandpas, babies, and citizens that almost looks like they're waving. The type treatment suggest the Nazi armband with the type following the tilt of the swastika.

The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse

2009-02-24T15:21:00.007-05:00

by Richard Thompson Ford // Picador

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

What do hurricane Katrina victims, millionaire rappers buying vintage champagne, and Ivy League professors waiting for taxis have in common? All have claimed to be victims of racism. But these days almost no one openly defends bigoted motives, so either a lot of people are lying about their true beliefs, or a lot of people are jumping to unwarranted conclusions--or just playing the race card. Daring, entertaining, and incisive, The Race Card brings sophisticated legal analysis, eye-popping anecdotes, and plain old common sense to this heated topic.

Not the GREATEST idea in the world but I liked the simplicity of this design. I desaturated the image to make it monochromatic and relate a little bit more to the subject.
An interesting thing I learned while designing this came about when I was determining the representational sizes of the cards on the cover. If I reduced the cards slightly smaller that actual size, it somehow looked wrong. I realized that if you have an object on the cover that's near to actual size and it's not, you spend too much time wondering why it looks off. So if it's near, make it actual or make it much bigger.

The Housekeeper and the Professor

2009-02-17T10:00:00.013-05:00

by Yoko Ogawa // A Picador Paperback Original

A beautiful story of a brilliant math professor, with a peculiar problem--since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper with a ten-year-old son who is hired to care for him. And between them a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms. Though the professor can hold new memories for only eighty minutes, his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past; and through him, the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the housekeeper and her son. The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.

The professors sees and speaks of the world around him in terms of math. I thought of a cherry blossom tree scattering its many petals in the wind. How the professor would see that pattern as a complex math equation and how the housekeeper could connect and begin to see the world in his terms. Along the edges where the pink background meets the photo, I printed the ∏ / Pi equation taken out to 200 decimal places to echo the meeting of the analytical and the emotional.
Nature, meet Math. Math, this is Nature.

Click to hear the ∏ / Pi song.

Going down the side along the turnover, the point where the cover folds into the flaps, I typeset Pi to 200+ decimal places in fine print:

I forgot that this book was slated to come out a couple of years ago but under the title The Gift of Numbers. It was delayed because we were not happy with the English translation of the Japanese manuscript. I guess I shouldn't have used Babelfish. Here's the comp that only made it to Advance Uncorrected Proofs:

Photograph by Laura Hanifin

This is the second book I've designed for Yoko Ogawa. Her previous title was The Diving Pool. I remember picking this particular cherry blossom image with the dominant blue sky because I thought it would be nice to tie in with the overall blue of the pool. I think I'll have to find a way to use blue on her next novel.

Judging the AAUP

2009-02-14T15:02:00.007-05:00

Way back in January 22, 2009, Deb Wood and I had the honor of judging the AAUP / The Association of American University Presses Book, Jacket, & Journal Show, 2009. The results are in! Congratulations to all who entered.

One of my favorite blogs, Faceout Books was kind enough to ask us for the INSIDE SCOOP behind the judging process. Enjoy the ramblings of a mad man.

From the AAUP Judges
FaceOut Books
Feb 9, 8:11 AM
I talked with Henry Sene Yee and Deb Wood to see if we could get the inside scoop on the judging process for the AAUP. They were kind enough to share with us some of what went on.
–Jason Gabbert

From Henry:
Designer Scott Levine at Cornell University Press recommended me to be one of two judges at this year's AAUP design competition. They were kind enough to offer to pay for my expenses to get to the place of judging. Sounds great. A little traveling would be nice. It turns out that their headquarters are here in NYC. Just down the block from the Flatiron where I work. I should've at least taken a cab half a block to my deli.

Scheduled to meet at 9 AM. We were set up in the quiet AAUP's office. One room had tables piled with books waiting to be judged for their interiors. There were so many interesting titles that I wanted to read. We asked what becomes of them after the judging and were told that they get donated to libraries and senior citizen homes. The jackets and covers were set up in the mail / supply room next door, spread out on the table. Deb Wood, the Design Director of Princeton Architectural Press was the other co-judge for the covers. I've never met Deb Wood although I've always admired her work at Princeton Architectural Press (PAP), no association with Princeton University Press (PUP). Ironically, we had both judged the NY Book show a month before but she was at the next table judging a different category. We had our coffee and we started going through the piles. Roughly separating them into NAYs and MAYBEs. There were surprising amounts of thoughtful and challenging solutions. A few designers names kept popping up with consistently good designs. We were pretty much in agreement on what we thought was a design that worked well. I was looking for good typography, clean information hierarchy, a fresh approach to the subject genres, interesting image choices. A photographer took pictures of us as we were deliberating. We tried to look thoughtful yet not Muppet-like in our expressions. We had a rough cut of about 45 chosen entries and needed to break it down to 35. But it was lunch time and we needed a break ourselves. We all went down the block to Monster Sushi. The restaurant is decorated with Godzilla memorabilia. They make a deliciously juicy yellow tail special roll. When they first opened, they were known as Godzilla Restaurant until TOHO, the copyright holders sued them for intellectual property infringement. You can read more here.

Back at the judging circle we continued our edits. With a more critical eye, we took some out. Reevaluated. Replaced jackets. One or two became less of a YAY after several viewing while others in the MAYBEs that insistently made it's presence known were added to the YAYs. Exhausting.
We then were asked to write our judge's comments. After the first one, we knew we were going to run out of adjectives and perhaps fall into the trap of saying the same boring comments. Nice blah, blah blah. Good use of blah, blah, blah. Who's really going to read this? So Deb and I decided to be a little bit loose and personal with our observations. Praising the use of hang quotes, colors, interaction between type and image. Throwing in puns and alliterations. That was fun and helped bring our energy level back up. In between pauses, we were checking our work emails on our iPhones. Getting coffee and updating my Facebook page. I tried convincing Deb to join Facebook. We were done by 4:00. Complete. Finito. Whew. But the interior judging was still hacking away. The piles were still high. They were going to have to come back tomorrow to continue. The AAUP wanted us all to meet up afterwards for drinks at the Algonquin hotel but I was beat. I was anxious to get back to work and finish up some projects for that day. Later on I had dinner and drinks and when I got home, I saw a Facebook friend request from Deb Wood. Hello new friend.

From Deb:
I really enjoyed judging the AAUP, it was refreshing to see the caliber of design coming from university presses. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Henry and I had to make some tough choices, as there were an overwhelming number of qualifying entries. (As you can probably see from the list!)

I often feel strange about judging a book cover without knowing the whole back story. As someone who's daily life consists of solving issues related to book design, I'm well aware that there is much more than meets the eye when we see an unresolved design or a missed opportunity. There are so many voices and challenges that the designer faces when designing a book cover. Sometimes what appears as a lukewarm cover, could actually be a triumph over many adversaries.

Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq

2009-02-05T23:08:00.008-05:00

by Charles Duelfer

Art Director: Pete Garceau // PublicAffairs

Charles Duelfer is one of the most senior intelligence officers with on the ground experience to have worked in Iraq, before, during and after the Gulf War. He was asked by President Bush to investigate and report on why there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and his report was the first to provide official confirmation of the absence of WMD and an account for why so many people had believed they existed. (To see how the report was received – it was front page news – see Dana Priest’s Washington Post verdict) Duelfer was also entrusted with supervising the interrogation of Saddam Hussein after his capture. He has been at the heart of US intelligence’s dealing with Iraq since 1993, and he reported personally to George Tenet.

This book is nothing less that the search for truth amid the many deceptions in Iraq, the story of how Iraq was assessed as a threat, how Saddam responded fatefully to US demands, and how the decisions to topple the Saddam regime were implemented. No one is better able to see inside the mindsets of two administrations – the US and Iraqi – with their mismatched priorities, wounded pride and dangerous ability to bluff and counterbluff.

We searched high and low for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and never found them. To depict a bomb or anything concrete on the cover that suggested what they were looking for would contradict the book. I thought a good approach was to make it all type and have the title created by the idea of what they were looking for. Obsessively blinded by their search, WMD is always right in front of their eyes and they see it when it doesn't exist. I gave it a stenciled / spray paint look to suggest the military.

Other variations:

This one looked a little too, Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand, Six Hundred WMD-ish.

The Ego Tunnel

2009-01-26T12:34:00.003-05:00

by Thomas Metzinger

Art Director: Nicole Caputo // Basic Books

What a difficult book for me to grasp. I think what this book is saying is that our consciousness does not exist in the outside world or the inner ego but in the space, membrane or "tunnel" in between. Or something like that.
Nicole suggested a beautiful, abstract pattern that symbolized this transition between these two worlds. After much trial and error, I thought of the childhood toy Spirograph. I went to Toys 'R Us and bought a new set. It all fancy and comes in an over designed template holder. It's horribly made. After a few bumpy revolutions, the wheel and pen would slip and skip and mars all your hard worked fun. Don't buy it.

Sketches:

Bodies: BIG IDEAS // small books

2009-01-05T15:19:00.010-05:00

by Susie Orbach
BIG IDEAS // small books A Picador Paperback Original

• A 2010 Communication Arts Photography Annual 51 Winner

Photograph by Jon Shireman

Throughout the Western world, people have come to believe that general dissatisfaction can be relieved by some change in their bodies. Here Susie Orbach explains the origins of this condition, and examines its implications for all of us.

Instead of using our bodies to change and remake the outside world, we spend our energy and time changing and remaking our bodies in the search for something else.

In my brain storming phone discussions with the photographer Jon Shireman, we were trying to define what this book was about. After several fruitless conversations, the word "Erase" came up. I immediately saw a body getting erase. Maybe a photograph of a person. But we decided a pencil drawing of a form would work best in the Big Ideas series look. I was more interested in the action. To also bring across the concept that we reform ourselves, using a drawing allowed us to use the leftover eraser bits to reform it back into the new body's shape.

This is an alternate image that I liked very much and wanted to use, right until the final mechanical stage. But in the end, I thought it suggested cloning or creating another body more than remaking yourself. I kept seeing Athena leaping out of Zeus' head fully grown:

Mary Cregan wrote a small piece about the cover in her Book Covers Blog, The Financial Times.

Susie Orbach on The Colbert Report:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Susie Orbach

colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

NASA Name Contest

Readerville's Blog of the Week

2008-12-19T19:20:00.007-05:00

Before the proliferation of blogs dedicated to the appreciation of cover design today, readerville.com was the only site on the web where you could read any discussions focusing on the cover design instead of the content. The Most Coveted Covers features were a must read and the follow up comments that began with admiration but quickly degraded to negativity was even more fun to read. Even though it sometimes annoyed the sh*t out of me.

So a big thanks to Karen Templer for highlighting my blog as the Readerville.com Blog of the Week.

The web is full of beautiful websites by book cover designers showcasing their work, but they are strictly that—portfolios of finished work. Henry Sene Yee (whose work, I should note, often appears in Most Coveted Covers) has taken a very different approach....

The Biggest Game in Town

2008-12-11T12:34:00.003-05:00

by Al Alvarez // Picador

Illustration by Eddie Guy

Al Alvarez touched down in Las Vegas one hot day in 1981, a poker novice and a stranger to the excesses of the American game. Soon enough he was in the casino back rooms and musty bars of Las Vegas, meeting the flamboyant characters who dominate the World Series of Poker—roving gamblers who have won and lost many fortunes at the tables. Set over the course of one tournament, The Biggest Game in Town is both a chronicle of the World Series of Poker and a history of the hustlers, madmen, and masterminds who created the high-stakes game in America. With a new introduction by the author, Alvarez’s classic account is one of the greatest gaming stories ever told.

My original concept was to depict a city built on poker. I hired collage illustrator Eddie Guy to bring this idea alive. He collaged up the Las Vegas Strip out of playing cards and poker chips. But trying to depict the Strip was less than satisfying. We focused instead on the larger than life personalities of these poker mavericks. Thus, Giant Poker Guy.

Sketches:

Poker Hand Rankings (Because you got to know when hold 'em, know when to fold 'em):

The Other Side of the Island

2008-12-04T09:30:00.012-05:00

by Allegra Goodman

Editor/Art Director: Jessica Rothenberg // Razorbill Books / Penguin
Jacket photograph by Andrea Chu
Model: Alexis Y // Generation

In the eighteenth glorious year of Enclosure, long after The Flood, a young girl named Honor moves with her parents to Island 365 in the Tranquil Sea. Life on the tropical island is peaceful—there is no sadness and no visible violence in this world. Earth Mother and her Corporation have created New Weather. Sky color is regulated and it almost never rains. Every family fits into its rightful, orderly, and predictable place...
Except Honor’s. Her family does not follow the rules. They ignore curfew, sing songs, and do not pray to Earth Mother. Honor doesn’t fit in with the other children at the Old Colony School. Then she meets Helix, a boy who slowly helps her uncover a terrible secret about the Island: Sooner or later, those who do not fit disappear, and they don’t ever come back.

This was my first assignment working with a YA (Young Adult) Publisher.

Having worked strictly for the adult trade market, I had to learn as I designed what was the appropriate look for the teen/tween market. My first attempts were either too sophisticated or too subtle for young reader. I had to learn a more direct language.

My first approach was to suggest the near future Utopian Island:
How about bullseye, because the character is an expert archer, overprinting in silver to represent a technology that blocks any signs of bad weather and the truth.

Nope? How about Adventure? (Honor is an excellent shot with a bow and arrow and uses her skills to save her parents):

Nope? Maybe I'll focus on the extreme atmospheric changes on the other side of the island
(In the future, They can control the weather so that it's always sunny over their community):

That's close. Let's depict the girl running in a storm (She searches for her missing parents on the "Other Side" on the island where the weather isn't under the government's control) Usually in adult trade, I try to avoid depicting the main character so up front. But for the YA market, it's OK to visualize them. Sorta like how Harry Potter is visualized as a branded character:

Out of all of those, let's go with this one:

Love the concept but can I find another stock image where the girl is much younger, wears no make-up, has the right expression of fear and determination and is set against a much stormier sky.

Hmmm, trying to find all of this in a single stock photo is impossible. IMPOSSIBLE. It would be much easier to shoot this. Luckily they agreed and increased my budget.

Photographer Andrea Chu had sent me a promo earlier in the week and Kelly Blair also recommended her as a person she worked with. Her portfolio showed lots of experience with working with children so I hired her for the shoot. We found the lovely model Alexis Y through a modeling agency.

The photoshoot. Alexis was so professional, patient, conveyed the characters emotions perfectly and was just a breeze to work with.

An outtake shot:

Thanks to LeeAnn Falciani for manning the wind machine.

and the storm cloud background by ryan/beyer/getty images

Almost there:

But the type was too active. Go simpler and more legible please.

After a bunch of tweaks to the type, coloration of the sky, and opening up the shadows on her neck and hair, VOILÀ! The FINAL DESIGN:

Here's a good tutorial on Masking Details No Bigger Than a Hair in Photoshop and a video tutorial: Masking Hair in Photoshop CS3

The Best Book Cover Designs of 2008?

2008-12-02T14:42:00.004-05:00

According to Joseph's The Book Design Review blog site, these are his Favorite Book Covers of 2008. Two of mine are represented here.

Vote for your favorite. I did.

Cracks in the Foundation

2008-11-13T19:47:00.005-05:00

by Erica Ferencik // Waking Dream Press

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

I occasionally get request directly from authors asking if I'm available to design their covers. Always flattering, but I usually say no because of my busy schedule. And unless they're at a Publishing House and their Art Director hires me directly, I don't want to be stepping on toes. One of the things I hate to hear from the editor is that the author has a friend who's a designer and has great ideas, can you work with them. Yikes. I had a job where the editor told me that the author's response was, "A good start, can the designer give us the layered files so that my sister can move the elements around?" Get Thee Away From Me!

But in this case, Erica was doing it all. A one-person self-publishing house. Which has its own set of challenges. That means, in addition to being the author, she's the Publisher, the Marketing dept, the Sales dept, the Production Manager, Managing Editor, Copy Writer, Copy Editor, Art Director, and assistant. Imagine trying to get something approved. I have no one to rally on my side. It was a long process but in the end very enjoyable. It's a fun read. Check it out. Good luck with your book Erica!

Juhasz's Sketches:

PRINT Regional Design Annual 2008

2008-11-11T18:32:00.001-05:00

I was quoted in the NEW YORK CITY section of this year's PRINT REGIONAL DESIGN ANNUAL 2008: NEW YORK CITY. December 2008. On your newstand now

By Jeremy Lehrer

The design literacy of clients and the general public alike was a recurring concern this year for art director Philippe Apeloig and designer Ronny Quevedo, as it was for many New York designers. The duo challenged that literacy with their event calendars and posters for the French Institute/Alliance Française, a Manhattan-based organization that promotes French culture and programming. Apeloig and Quevedo used playful, colorful compositions of dots—a modern riff on pointillism— as a conceptual device. The layout’s unusual design and typography choices don’t just unite the campaign, Quevedo says: “We’re also educating the reader on how to read our materials.”
     Point Five Design founding partner Alissa Levin thinks design literacy has vastly improved in recent years, partly because viewers are constant consumers of an increasingly design-savvy internet. Could this mean web design has become a positive influence on print work? “I feel like it has opened up possibilities in print,” Levin says. “Perhaps it’s because not all the pressure is on the print pieces, so it actually makes more room to try different things.” In the past, clients often hired two different firms for print and web components; Levin finds that it has become much more common to hire the studio to create both, as the Columbia Journalism Review did for a redesign of its print edition and website. Point Five’s redesign of CJR, completed in 2007, gives the magazine a bold cover format and a minimal, typographically elegant overall design that emphasizes the publication’s role as a media watchdog. Also in media, the business-culture magazine Condé Nast Portfolio debuted in late April 2007. The cover of its first issue featured a stunning aerial view of a nighttime cityscape, and standout photography and sublime information graphics have remained a centerpiece of the magazine’s visual identity. Continuing the minimalist trend in editorial design, design director Robert Priest explains that he and his team were striving for simplicity. “We want to be a lively and energetic magazine in terms of what we present, but there’s a certain clean aesthetic that we’re going for.”
     Photography forms the aesthetic DNA of many magazines, among them Newsweek, whose showcase portfolios in 2007 included scenes of Darfur, portraits of the four seasons in Japan, and photographs that revisited 1968’s pivotal leaders. Newsweek director of photography Simon Barnett says that Paolo Pellegrin, who took the pictures of Darfur, “is the most accomplished photographer working today who is able to bridge the difficult line between journalism and art. … [He] is at the leading edge of the new, young photojournalism movement, which has its roots in Italy. The photography is lyrical and operatic, and it is an amazing way to see the world.”
     Even in a weakening economy, the New York design business was robust in 2007 and through the summer of 2008; studios and design businesses reported hiring numerous freelancers to complete a full docket of work. At book publisher Picador, creative director Henry Sene Yee reports that 2007 was “very creative, not just with me, but with colleagues,” and the same has been true in 2008.
     Still, Yee began to worry when he realized that electronic readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s eBook had become enjoyable to use—even to him. “I think it’s going to allow people to read even more, but I don’t know what my role as a cover designer will be in that e-book future,” he says. One technology that’s exciting him, however, is design: related (designrelated.com), a networking site known informally as “MySpace for designers.” Yee has commissioned covers from designers he found on the site, and he praises it as a way of finding artisans working for lesser-known presses outside New York. “They’re doing incredible work for these small presses—these high-end concepts and designs that are just beautiful,” he enthuses.
     Designing with sustainability in mind continues to be a focus for designers, and, more and more, for clients as well. Suggestions for recycled papers and sustainable printing presses were “always something that we would bring to the table, and often— whether it was cost or something [else]—it was a difficult sell,” says Levin. “Now, it seems like people are really on board and want to know how they can do it and what they can do.” Seth Labenz of Brooklyn-based studio Topos Graphics notes that not everything labeled green is as sustainable as it should be. “We’ve found or observed that solutions are sometimes motivated by the appearance of being green, as opposed to a true commitment to real change,” he says.
     Labenz, with Topos partner Roy Rub, creates consistently avant-garde design that’s certainly helping expand design’s vocabulary—and its audience’s general literacy, too. He’s optimistic about design’s future possibilities: “It used to be a technique of marketing,” he says, “whereas today, more and more, it is not only that but a vehicle for reflection, knowledge, history, criticism, vision, provocation—a lens for culture but also an embedded, utilitarian tool for discourse and change.” The duo’s work, and the work of their fellows throughout New York City, reflects that exhilarating new mandate.

Jeremy Lehrer, a contributing editor at PRINT, is a freelance writer who covers design, sustainability, and spirituality.
This article appears in the December 2008 issue of PRINT.

Advice to War Presidents

2008-11-05T13:30:00.005-05:00

by Angelo Codevilla

Art Director: Nicole Caputo // Basic Books

From a distinguished conservative scholar, a primer on the principles of foreign policy and how the United States, having ignored these principles for nearly a century, can use them to resolve its current crisis.

The Art Director Nicole Caputo wanted me to try, "a small handbook that has a plain state dept look, like a type pamphlet to war presidents" feel. This idea has been overdone and I've probably done it a hundred of times myself. But I'm here to serve the Art Director and her editor and I'll do my best to give it a fresh take. I thought working with a simpler amount of elements would keep it from looking too cluttered. The texture was key. I had an old A.T.A. Advertising Standard Type Book from 1951 that was laying around my office that I was actually going to throw away. It had a great pebbly textured case with gold foil type stamped into it. That would be a nice thing to play with.

The book itself is filled with pretty standard fonts, hence the name. So I thought this would be a no brainer in cleaning out my office. But because of this assignment, it just reinforces the idea that you can never throw anything out because you never know when you'll need to use it.

Another idea was to work with the Presidential Seal.

I heard somewhere that in times of peace, the Seal of the President of the United States depicts the bald eagle facing its usual direction towards its talons clutching the olive branch of peace. But in times of war, it is switched out with the eagle facing its talons clutching arrows of war. I like the idea that the state of conduct of the Union extends to even the smallest of details. But I read that it's just urban legend.

Alternate concept focusing on the Talons of WAR:

The US Government didn't allow us permission to use the original Seal so I had to recreate one for the final. I chose to combine an alternate idea that focused on the Eagle's Talons of War.

I like the way this turned out. It suggest that maybe this was Presidents Woodrow Wilson's original handbook and that it has been passed down from President to President offering advice. And now it'll be in the hands of our 44th President, Barack Obama.

Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life

2008-10-23T19:23:00.002-04:00

by Robin Wilson

Art Director: Chin-Yee Lai // W. W. Norton & Co.

While doing research for this book, I came across a medical condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome:

also known as micropsia and macropsia, is a brain condition affecting the way objects are perceived by the mind. For example, an afflicted person may look at a larger object, like a basketball, and perceive it as if it were the size of a mouse. The condition manifests itself in connection with various other conditions, such as epilepsy, anxiety, and migraines. The disease is named after Lewis Carroll's novel due to the size changes Alice experiences. Carroll documented cases of classic migraines, so scholars have speculated that he may have experienced symptoms of macropsia or micropsia.

Since the emphasis of this book was on Lewis Carroll's forgotten achievements in the world of mathematics, I thought it was a a good idea to refer to Alice in Wonderland on the cover, but drastically de-emphasize her scale to frame it in this book's context to numbers.

Jacket illustration: Alice and the Cheshire Cat, illustration from Alice in the Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Color Litho) by John Tenniel, Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library.

Alternate comps:

Lewis Carroll's "The Mouse's Tale" is one of my favorite example of a typeset book interior from 1865.

Voices: A Reykjavík Thriller

2008-09-25T11:49:00.000-04:00

by Arnaldur Indridason // Picador

Cover photograph by Laura Hanifin

Whatever It Takes

2008-09-22T15:08:00.005-04:00

by Paul Tough

Photograph by Jeff Riedel for The New York Times
Art Director: Michaela Sullivan // Houghton Mifflin Company

The Art Director Michaela Sullivan gave me a selection of photographs to work with. Mostly images of young students in their classrooms engaged and learning. But this pied piper shot of Geoffrey Canada amongst the multitude of children filling up a Harlem street said it all. Showing us all what is at stake.

What would it take?

That was the question that Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children — not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in the lives — their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.

Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but also of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, this is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.

Breakfast with Buddha

2008-09-18T17:30:00.004-04:00

by Roland Merullo

Art Director: Anne Winslow // Algonquin Books

Photograph by Jon Shireman

A spiritual road-trip novel.
The idea was to show Buddha or spiritual in some way on the cover. I thought of sunny side up eggs, or an enlightening stream of morning sunlight through a window. But thought a subtler way was Buddha shaped salt & pepper shakers in a breakfast setting with a plates of sunny side up eggs. I thought that was too much information so I changed it to a road side diner setting to suggest eating on the road.
I did a web search and was surprised that there actually were salt & pepper shakers in the shape of Buddhas from Neiman Marcus. But unfortunately they were not available. So the photographer Jon Shireman went down to the Pearl River Mart in Chinatown and found some wooden miniature Buddhas. We faked it by painting them glossy black and white to suggest ying and yang and drilling holes into it's head.

Salt & Pepper Shakers from Neiman Marcus / Not at a store near you.

The Paris Review Interviews: vol. 3

2008-09-18T12:19:00.004-04:00

Introduction by Margaret Atwood // Edited by Philip Gourevitch
The Paris Review / Picador

• A PRINT's Regional Design Annual Selection

So I held out as long as I could from using red. I wanted to change it up and tried different background color versions. One using a purple so deep that it almost looks like black and one with a bright magenta. But good old fire engine red was what they wanted. I did try jazzing it up a little by using metallic silver and a greenish yellow and spot gloss on the large quotation marks.

Rotten

2008-09-16T17:31:00.006-04:00

by John Lydon // Picador

by Jamie Reid. God Save the Queen (Single cover),1977. Newsprint, photocopy and paper.

I didn't realize that the band logo used on "Never Mind the Bollocks" was a photostat copy of the cut and paste type used on God Save the Queen. I still don't know what fonts were used in the original.

While doing research, I found this great article uncovering the background story behind the rock band logos.
The Top 10 Rock Band Logos by Koldo Barroso

coltrane

2008-08-20T15:08:00.013-04:00

by Ben Ratliff // Picador

Cover photograph by © Rolf Ambor / ctsimages.com

Other Concepts:

The idea here was to depict John Coltrane as a sound wave. I thought these images were well-known enough to weather the abstraction. But for the final, we went with a stunning portrait that put the focus on his hand on the saxophone keys.

On the back cover, I printed Coltrane's Selmer Mark VI saxophone bell pattern as a subtle black on black background pattern:

Here's a collection of Blue Note: Over 1000 great jazz album covers.

Here's an awesome video of Miles Davis and John Coltrane performing
"So What" Live-New York, April 2, 1959:

I love observing the other musicians. When they're not busy performing, they're busy smoking.

Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative

2008-07-31T16:35:00.007-04:00

by Paul John Eakin

Art director: Scott Levine // Cornell University Press

Hand-lettering by LeeAnn Falciani

The theme of the author is that (we create a sense of ourselves by the stories we tell) but with a new twist: he argues that narrative is not merely something we invent; it is an essential part of our sense of who we are. In fact, so close is the connection between narrative and identity that we should speak of “narrative identity”—a term he hopes will become part of the life writing lexicon.

I tried to convey these two co-exisiting states visually by using the idea of handwritten drafts/thoughts and typeset published finals overlaying each other. The simplicity of this solution reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye, from which I borrowed the color palette. Sorry J.D., But you didn't like these colors anyway.

My personal copy:

If you really want to hear about it, my beat up copy of The Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite books. And this plain, all Times Roman typeface, solid Maroon and Yellow type paperback is one of my favorite cover designs. A perfect marriage of content, form and memories. The cover demands that you fill in the rest yourself. Compared to the simplicity of this, all other designs are just plain phony.

Forgotten Patriots

2008-07-01T00:04:00.006-04:00

by Edwin G. Burrows

Art Director: Nicole Caputo // Basic Books

Jacket painting:
The Nation Makers, 1903 (oil on canvas) by Howard Pyle (1853-1911) © American Illustrators Gallery, NYC / The Bridgeman Art Library

Listen to this audio clip to learn more about Howard Pyle and the background story of the painting.

Alternate idea:

The Painted Word

2008-06-20T00:01:00.003-04:00

by Tom Wolfe // Picador

Painting by Norman Rockwell

Cover painting: The Connoisseur by Norman Rockwell, printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency Inc. © 1962, Norman Rockwell Family Entities. Photograph courtesy of the Archives of the American Illustrators Gallery, NYC © 2008 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
www.americanillustration.org

How often do you get the chance to work with a classic Norman Rockwell painting on a book cover? And when you do, you absolutely can not crop, alter or print type over it. Which is fine by me. Nice.

Initial idea:

A Plea for Eros

2008-06-11T23:10:00.003-04:00

by Siri Hustvedt // A Picador Paperback Original

Painting by Alan Baker

Here's a video of what became of the original painting:

One More Year

2008-06-04T13:11:00.005-04:00

by Sana Krasikov

Art Director: Emily Mahon // Spiegel & Grau / Doubleday

Photography by Henry Sene Yee

The brilliant Emily Mahon was my former assistant and in this role reversal, for the first time EVER, she is Art Directing me. She did a great job.

A short story collection centering around the lives of immigrant families, many from Soviet Georgia. Emily thought it would be great to use one of my photographs on the cover to show the lives of these characters stuck in a rut. I decided to create still frames of my time-lapse movies. Showing the mundane but still beautiful, calming passage of time.

This time lapse clip was captured outside my window on a hazy, humid night on July 30, 2007.

Alternate Comps:

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

2008-05-22T11:25:00.008-04:00

FINAL APPROVED DESIGN:

by Tom Wolfe // Picador

Hand-lettering & Illustration by Phil Pascuzzo. Based on a visual developed by Laura Hanifin

MY ORIGINAL IDEA:

Hand-lettering by Phil Pascuzzo

This book was about the rustic/Grateful Dead proto-Psychedelia movement and I didn't want to evoke the urban and developed Haight-Ashbury Psychedelia look or the Peter Max / Milton Glaser take on the '60s. This cover was inspired by the original 1965 Muir Beach Acid Test poster created by Norman Hartweg that was later hand-colored by Ken Kesey's daughter, Sunshine Kesey:

But this design was considered too hippie-dippie, crunchy-granola and a cleaner, more psychedelic redesign was requested.

My new idea was to focus on the Merry Prankster Bus, "Further," render it as a black and white pen and ink drawing ala The Beatles' REVOLVER album cover and project a psychedelic multi-color lava lamp effect over it.

Laura Hanifin's photographic interpretation of this was a toy bus painted white and dripping with colored paint.

Photograph by Laura Hanifin

Tom loved the idea but didn't want a photograph of a generic bus. He asked if we could instead, have an illustration of the actual Merry Prankster bus FURTHER and brighter. Ugh! This has to go to the printers yesterday.

So in a rare and unusual move, I took Laura's interpretation and put it back in Phil Pascuzzo's hand and he re-illustrated her approach using a photograph of the "FURTHUR" bus as reference which became the final cover.

Whew, approved. Just made the printer's deadline.
The final will be separated as 4/C process but with the cyan, magenta, and yellow inks replaced with their fluorescent equivalents for a brighter psychedelic look. Hopefully.

Big thanks to Laura and Phil-Dog for putting their egos aside, getting the job done and saving my ass.

TIME Interviews Tom Wolfe

Violence: BIG IDEAS // small books

2008-05-14T17:47:00.007-04:00

by Slavoj Žižek
BIG IDEAS // small books / A Picador Paperback Original

Photograph by Jon Shireman

Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Slavoj Žižek, constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in our world.

Using history, philosophy, books, movies, Lacanian psychiatry, and jokes, Slavoj Žižek examines the ways we perceive and misperceive violence. Drawing from his completely unique cultural vision, Žižek brings new light to the Paris riots of 2005; he questions the permissiveness of violence in philanthropy; in daring terms, he reflects on the powerful image and determination of contemporary terrorists.

From TimeOut Chicago book review // Issue 183 : Aug 28–Sep 3, 2008:

"Picador has more of these books lined up, and we hope they continue to be both as engaging and relevant as these two first salvos. And we hope they keep designer Henry Sene Yee churning out the tiny, beautiful packages." —Jonathan Messinger

Authors@Google Presents Slavoj Žižek // September 12, 2008

Slavoj Žižek - A debate with Steven Lukes // Barnes & Noble Union Square, NYC

Moral Relativism: BIG IDEAS // small books

2008-05-14T17:46:00.003-04:00

by Steven Lukes
BIG IDEAS // small books / A Picador Paperback Original

Photograph by Jon Shireman

Moral relativism attracts and repels. What is defensible in it and what is to be rejected? Do we as human beings have no shared standards by which we can understand one another? Can we abstain from judging one another's practices? Do we truly have divergent views about what constitutes good and evil, virtue and vice, harm and welfare, dignity and humiliation, or is there some underlying commonality that trumps it all?

Slavoj Žižek - A debate with Steven Lukes // Barnes & Noble Union Square, NYC

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

2008-04-23T17:15:00.005-04:00

by Julie Phillips // Picador

James Tiptree, Jr., burst onto the science fiction scene in the late 1960s with a series of hard-edged, provocative stories. He redefined the genre with such classics as Houston, Houston, Do You Read? and The Women Men Don't See. For nearly ten years he wrote and carried on intimate correspondences with other writers—Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and Ursula K. Le Guin, though none of them knew his true identity. Then the cover was blown on his alter ego: "he" was actually a sixty-one-year-old woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon. A feminist, she took a male name as a joke—and found the voice to write her stories.