Blog

Artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die, or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back up and do the best work you ever...  >

Elsewhere
Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do >

Other

< Back to Blog
0 Comments

What goes into making a cover

JA November 12

That you can’t please everyone is no secret in the world of book design. The author, the editor, the publisher and the sales and marketing team – all will have an opinion about how the book should look, and, as often as not, these opinions will clash. What’s less common, however, is opening up, truthfully and bluntly, about this process, even though the stories behind covers can be fascinating mini-narratives in themselves. The well-known US cover for Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for example, when through some 50 versions before Knopf Doubleday chairman and editor in chief Sonny Mehta approved the final cut.

So it’s all the most interesting then to see that Penguin have released a book about the creative process behind 75 of their recent covers, with surprisingly frank commentary from the designers, authors, art directors and illustrators.

Here, for example, is what Garrison Keillor had to say about the cover for Love Me, designed by Jamie Keenan:

lovemecover_0

This cover gives me a bad case of the yips. … At first glance, it looks like oak beams drying at the lumberyard, or a bad dream about coffins, or a child’s rendering of an aerial view of Dupont Circle, or an explosion at Legoland. It doesn’t suggest anything that is in the book.

Maybe it was designed for the Penguin edition of The Trial by Franz Kafka, and Kafka didn’t like it so they stuck me with it. Anyway, it could’ve been worse, as we say. It could’ve been fruit bats hanging from bare knobby limbs or a colour photo of suppurating bedsores. So I bear no ill will … I still have a copy and I enjoy reading it very much. It’s a funny book, though you’d never know it from this.

Others, like Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does it Feel to be a Problem, designed by Jon Gray, simply had a change of heart.

howdoesit_feelcover_0

At first, the Arabic was all wrong. Needless to say, it didn’t endear me to the design… We corrected [this], but other reservations persisted. The cover looked to me like a 1960s manifesto, while my book was about real people whose stories of struggle had been drowned out by the noise of ideology. The flag imagery of the cover seemed to pit American against Arab, contrary, I thought, to the complexities of my book. I felt like I was fighting with the cover, and losing.

A few months later, I changed my mind. One afternoon, I was speaking to a group of Christian ministers who had kindly invited me into their conversation about discrimination in America. One minister told me how much she liked my book before telling everyone that she had a confession to make. The Arabic on the cover, she said, had made her nervous when reading in public. She knew it was shameful, but she covered up the Arabic whenever she read the book outside her house. The cover, she admitted, helped her recognise the depths of her own fears and prejudices. That’s the moment I realised that this bold and powerful cover beautifully mirrors the aims of the pages within.

You can read a previews of some other comments on the website, here. (via Creative Review).


 

Our Friends


 

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