Pluralistic Design: A Collaborative Effort

Fairly recently, the New York Times published an article on authors and how much influence they have when it comes to the designing their books' covers. Although the cover may suit the book's content really well, the reality is: not much. Many authors have their own website or blog to promote their books, and it often sounds like they have very little or no control at all. In "Cover Stories," which was published on August 10, 2008, Steven Heller says of authors and the degree of control they possess over the appearance of their books:

Most authors have no control over their book covers. The designs are chosen by an art director and approved by a committee; usually the author doesn't even see the cover until the process is completed. But some writers, by virtue of either their renown or contractual caveat, not only get to accept or reject designs, but also choose the designer. Although rare, prolonged designer/author relationships contribute personality to an author's books, even when the individual designs are decidedly different. The following are three cases of enduring chemistry. 

The discussed authors and designers include Milton Glaser + Philip Roth, Rodrigo Corral + Chuck Palahniuk, and John Gall + Haruki Murakami. Maybe it was because I had just finished defining key terms, but when I saw John Gall's cover designs for Murakami's novels, I was immediately reminded of the global presence of design, and of learning about Japan's emergence as a design-oriented nation in particular.

"Cover Stories," An Essay by Steven Heller

Words To Include In Normal Conversation

So far, my favorite is Bandersnatch.The most recent remake of Alice in Wonderland, directed in 2010 by Tim Burton, includes creatures that did not get to make an appearance in Disney's animated version of Alice in Wonderland created in 1951. For example, take the Jabberwocky: it is a creature that appears in Tim Burton's 2010 movie and is actually based on one of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poems.

Recently I came across this book design for Lewis Carroll's poem, which is often referred to as "Jabberwocky": 

Book design by Raphael Urwiller

 I was really attracted to the color scheme used for this design, it reminded me of the bright colors used in poster designs (I can't remember the exact name of the poster, but I will update this post as soon as I find out.  Although I don't know the name, I did some research and found this painting by Lester Beall using a similar color scheme.)

Fuuuturist Pattern Poetry

The picture you see below is the book cover designed by gray318 for The Mayor's Tongue, a novel written by Nathaniel Rich. 

“‘The Mayor’s Tongue’ begins when two guys who work for a moving company in New York form an unlikely friendship...Alvaro speaks only Cibaeño, “virtually incomprehensible to natives of the other Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean”; Eugene speaks English and Italian. The friends are unable to communicate, and yet they converse feelingly, or at least they think they do. Alvaro is writing a novel that he asks Eugene to translate, and Eugene believes that he is able to capture the essence of the story, even without knowing the language.” 

—Sophie Gee, author of the New York Times' Sunday Book Review for The Mayor's Tongue. 

I really enjoyed following the words across the cover; I think it goes well with the subject of communication that appears in The Mayor's Tongue. When I first saw the cover design, its animated quality reminded me of Filippo Marinetti's pattern poetry in his Les mots en liberté futuristes (Futurist Words-in-Freedom) of 1919:

On a side note, this is also a great book whose cover text takes the shape of a hand: 

It's Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

William Morris and Book Cover Design

William Morris, leader of the Arts and Crafts movement in the nineteenth century (way back in chapter 10 of Meggs' History!) is the first person I think of when I look at these textile-inspired book designs:

From Penguin by Design, by David Pearson Design.

Hardcover Penguin Classics, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Harry Potter and The Order of the Bauhaus

See the symbol using a triangle and square inside a circle?

Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919-1923, 
László Moholy-Nagy (American, born Hungary. 1895-1946)

Shapes and primary colors. The combination of form and function. These were the primary tenets of the Bauhaus  art period. This idea to unify aesthetics or decoration with practicality originated in the Arts and Crafts Movement, and while nineteenth century artists did consider the function of an object, it seems they still placed more value on the beauty of an object's appearance. Literally meaning "building house," the basics of Bauhaus reminded me of the time when houses were made out of construction paper squares and triangles, instead of wood and insulation. That's not to say that it is a juvenile art style, though; many refer to it as one of the greatest influences in the development of modernist art and modern design. The Bauhaus' emphasis on shapes also reminded me of this symbol from the Harry Potter books, known as the Deathly Hallows.

The Codex

Codex: what a cool name for a book.

 It’s too bad the word didn’t stick for more contemporary forms of literature like the novel, but that’s because the word refers to a specific type of book; specifically manuscripts, which contain scripture or some kind of ancient writing. Even though the name is not commonly used, the codex-style bookbinding technique can still be seen everywhere.

How to make your own book, codex style.

Literally, I mean everywhere. In 2006, ArtStage, “a privately sponsored, public art exhibition” in Toronto, Canada, presented outdoor sculptures people could see on the way to a nearby airport.

Although The Book by Ilan Sandler’s size makes it easily seen from a distance, a closer look shows that there are shapes cut into the pages of the steel book sculpture.

The Book and its lost page

These shapes form clusters of words, which the artist refers to as “clustered texts [that] link the letters of the Latin alphabet to its predecessors, which include the Phoenician alphabet that emerged from Egyptian hieroglyphs...The future imprints of text on a page are dependent on their ancestral roots as well as the symbolic languages, codes, and alphabets that are evolving out of our contemporary society.”