Choice: BIG IDEAS // small books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: