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Five Questions for Design by Committee

JA August 16

While you may not immediately recognise the name, chances are you’ll have more than one of Josh Durham’s covers crowding your bookshelf – Emily McGuire’s Smoke in the Room, Luke Davies' God of Speed, Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, David Musgrave’s Glissando, Chris Womersley’s forthcoming Bereft and more besides. Since starting out in 2005, he’s worked with most of the publishers here in Australia, travelling under the tongue-in-cheek moniker of Design by Committee (a allusion to the collective and sometimes tricky nature of book design). Spike sat down with him across the digital divide to chat about distilling ideas, small victories and working out of a converted hospital room in Castlemaine.

DBC_books

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

I love my job, even though it does take over my life at times. Routine is a weird one – I have routine when I get home and bathe my little boy and have dinner with my partner, but my work life is pretty much all cobbled together around that. That’s not to say I am not organised – hell I write lists from time to time, I just never really switch off. I came home for lunch the other day and had spent the morning straining my brain trying to come up with a good cover concept for a political book and, three bites into my sandwich, I had it. I then refined it on the back of a magazine in the kitchen and had it mocked up and sent to the client an hour later. And it got up! So routine is a funny one.

OK, in broad strokes: I have a lovely walk to my office – I have stopped listening to my iPod and now use this time for thinking out my plan of attack for the day as well as rattling off some concept ideas if something is due that morning. It’s cold this time of year in Castlemaine, seriously cold, so if I have been working late, it’s the best way to clear my head and focus myself for the day ahead, which can quite often end after midnight.

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

Ghosts! Poltergeists. Screaming in the shower. My office is in an old hospital in Castlemaine. I am writing this at 11.30pm and I am the only person in the whole building and it’s dark and cold and now I am scaring myself. If you visited me during the day you would ride up the only elevator in town and take a sharp left past the operating theatre and into patient room 50 – my office. It’s quite tidy at the moment. I don’t have any biscuits. Sorry. But I CAN hook you up to a catheter.

DBC_shelf

Can you tell us about your drafting process? How do you move from early ideas to finished product?

I start by reading the manuscripts – as much as I can though it can be tricky when I have a lot on. I find this really helps me get my head around the book at hand – especially fiction which quite often demands an emotional response. The times when I have not read much of the book are the ones where I flail around for ideas and inspiration. The ideas are really the authors’ – my job is to distill them into something visually appealing, sometimes clever, and always marketable. I work quite quickly – I rarely sketch these days – I tend to form a clear since of a direction or concept in my head that I will quickly move to mockup stage to see whether it can work. Sometimes this is on paper – anything at hand (I tend to get a bit feverish at this point) or the computer, which is a good friend.

To back track a little – after reading the MS I start thinking hard about the book and start to generate ideas in my mind – quite often this happens at night lying in bed, in the shower, while listening to Julia Gillard, walking to and from work etc. I go through a process of looking at an idea from every angle, always questioning: will it appeal to the target market? Is it graphically strong enough? Does it have the requisite emotional pull? Is it in any way original and interesting?!

I’ve often heard it said that one of the biggest challenges of design is balancing the input for many different parties – do you agree?

Indeed – and I think publishing has more layers of approval than any other area of design I have worked in. Plus there’s something so final about a book cover which adds to everybody’s anxiety about the damn things. It is part of it, and it can be a positive thing. Sometimes it makes me re-evaluate what I have done and look at it in a new way. Sometimes it triggers new ideas.

From a purely financial perspective the hourly rate when taking in suggestions from authors, editors, marketing departments, publishers, their friends and pets, works out not much better than if I was selling paper hats out the front of my house. Conversely a cover can cruise through approvals and make it seem quite lucrative, and more importantly, creatively satisfying. It all evens out. I have grown used to compromise – it’s part of the deal. Especially with the big publishers who tend to err on the side of caution more often than not. I celebrate the small victories when they happen. I also think I have a damn good second folio sitting dormant on my hard drive.

Finally, what’s the last cover or artwork you loved, and why?

Hmm … so many great covers come out of the US and England. There are a few blogs dedicated to them and I periodically have a peek at them and then a quiet cry to myself about my own humble talents. I have favourite designers – the Knopf team (Peter Mendelsund, John Gall etc. etc.) always do great stuff, but then they are lucky enough to be working on hardbacks most of the time! I love cover of Nam Le’s The Boat by Carol Devine Carson – so simple but quietly powerful and thrilling. And not a boat in sight. And they say you shouldn’t do dark covers? This one proves otherwise. Non-fiction wise I love John Gall’s A General Theory of Love – so sweet and unexpected. A beautiful piece of original thinking.


 

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