< Back to Blog

Five questions for Bruno Herfst

JA October 27

Designer and illustrator Bruno Herfst is the creative mind behind many of our favourite covers – including the anthology Zombies vs Unicorns and the Jodi Picoult series, as well as Liar by Justine Larbalestier and Pink by Lili Wilkinson, both of which were shortlisted for this year’s APA Book Design Awards for best YA and Children’s cover. In the second of our design mini-interviews, Spike sat down with him over the digital divide to chat about thermo pink book covers, Tuxedomoon and how much there is to dig about handcrafted type.

What’s a typical day spent designing like for you? Can you describe your routine?

I have a lot of routines, most of them involve filling my cup with coffee. And then there is this thing called things: a wonderful task manager app I use everyday to stay on top of my projects.

It tells me what project I need to work on for the day. Most of the time I can still choose between two or three as there are always several books on the go at once. I try to take the project to each next step in my 8-step process as shown below. Do note that I use the word try here as there is always a chance a project needs to do a step (or two) back. No matter in what direction it moves it is always progressing.

1) Buzz
This is where the editor, publisher and designer talk about a new and exciting project. Sometimes there will be an illustrator on the table too. Well, not literally on the table.

2) Briefing
Now it is official and the brief comes as a formal document including scheduling dates, character and scene descriptions and overviews, target age group, genre, synopsis, a draft manuscript, and sometimes wild ideas …

3) Research
There is nothing better than getting stuck in the world wide net – on a research mission, of course.

4) Conception
This results in sketches, words, (mood) images, objects and hopefully multiple good ideas and cover concepts which I discuss with the editor and publisher.

5) Mock-ups
Sketch, sharpen, refine, correct. This involves making actual draft covers most of the time with low-res images and/or rough illustrations.

6) Final art
When the final design is agreed on I make the mock-up into a print ready file with high-res images and/or final illustrations.

7) Sending files to printer
Surprisingly this always takes longer then expected, double-checking if everything is right, filling in spec forms and burning disks (seriously, how long can that take?).

8) Checking proofs
Fun! (If you and the printer did everything right.)

If we made a surprise visit to your workspace, what would we see?

Can you tell us about the drafting process for one of your covers? How do you move from early ideas to finished product?

The drafting process always starts with doodles, these are slightly embarrassing sketches on random sized pieces of paper. Here you can see the early stage of an idea I doodled for the cover of ‘Pink’ by Lili Wilkinson, I still like the ‘Thermo – Book turns pink when touching’ idea. How cool would it be if you’ll leave pink fingerprints on the book after every reading session. It is also funny to see that I could not even manage to draw the cover to fit on the paper.

As you can see I had the idea to put all the different objects together like a puzzle. All objects would be in different shades of pink. I like the line I have written underneath: ‘Idea = pink comes in a lot of shades.’ That concept did change along the way. As you can see in my doodle it was not very clear at this point what the objects should be – I was just blocking out abstract shapes, so next I started to sketch the objects:

The next step was to make a more realistic digital sketch of what the book would look like, so I started putting things together as a mock-up:

Within this process, the concept changed a little. I thought it would be cool to make the cover all pink (without any shading) and to emboss the items and title. So the lighting in the mock-up was simulated and wouldn’t actually be printed. This would make it more of a 3D sculpture that carried all the information on it, as well being just one shade of pink.

During the next stage of the process, an important thing to note is that the typically ‘pink’ items were replaced by ‘non-pink’ items: the rose in the middle was replaced by a cockroach. I ditched the lipstick, the lips, the martini glass and the high-heeled shoe. I also refined and rounded the items into less complicated shapes with less detail (so the embossing stamp wouldn’t cut through the paper). I gave the burger more specific detail (so it didn’t look like a hotdog from the top perspective). The paint roller was rotated so it didn’t look like a fire extinguisher (Thanks Lili). And there were questions such as, do we still use lightbulbs like that? And um, there’s no cat in this novel – can we lose the cat?

Below is the final cover and, as you can see, we made the objects and title a little lighter, mainly because we were not sure if it was readable enough on the shelf in badly lit bookshops. We also introduced shading on the cover to amplify the effect of the embossing. And we made the objects slightly lighter. The effect of this fits YA because it is playful.

How is designing YA different say from adult or non-fiction covers?

Designing itself is not different. What is different, is the parameters within which we work.

There are some interesting things to note from a design perspective. YA and adult fiction both share parallel sub-genres, for example crime, romance and fantasy. The primary difference in designing the covers is not the genre, but age and lifestyle as we try to speak to the concerns of teenagers.

The other is that YA books tend to have slightly bigger body text and a more generous leading. From a typographic point of view this is odd considering teenagers presumably have better eyes than adults. This is because, type-size and leading is often used to signify how ‘difficult’ the content is.

Finally, what’s the last cover your loved, and why?

It is hard to make a good cover, definitely when it’s one of the greatest tracks of the 80’s (Tuxedomoon – In A Manner Of Speaking and I think Nouvelle Vague did an excellent job of that:

Anyway … I also bumped into this post from FontShop where they talked about this new typeface based on the hand-lettering of the book covers designed by Boudewijn Ietswaart. And this beautifully handcrafted type just turns me on! Man that looks good! I can’t believe we are looking at original drawings. Below is my favourite, the combination of perfectly spaced letters rhythmic illustration and the use of sporadic splodges of red, making it a cover I can look at for ages. And how good is the square flag! The only thing I find slightly odd is that the light on the left tower is inverted. Obviously I have been looking at it for too long :)

 

Our Friends

• Overland
• Alien Onion
• Ampersand Duck
• Andrew McDonald
• A Pair of Ragged Claws
• Arts Victoria
• Australia Council for the Arts
• Ben Eltham
• Bookshow blog
• CAL
• City of Tongues
• Crikey
• darkly wise, rudely great
• David Astle
• Elmo Keep Does Stuff
• The Ember
• Fly the Falcon blog
• Going Down Swinging
• Griffith Review
• Hackpacker
• Harvest
• HEAT
• Island
• Killings blog
• Literary Minded
• Lorraine Crescent
• Lynden Barber
• Mandy Ord
• Marcus Westbury
• Matilda
• Meanland
• Melbourne University Publishing
• Mel Campbell
• The Monthly
• Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
• Oslo Davis
• Paul Callaghan
• Read, Think, Write
• Sleepers Publishing
• Sorrow at Sills Bend
• SPLOG
• Tom Cho
• Virgule
• Wet Ink
• Wheeler Centre

Comments

 

Your name:

Your email address:

Your website:

Leave a comment:

Only the comment field is required. Omitting the ID fields increases your risk of being mistaken for spam.