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Designer: Nicole Caputo

We just updated Cover Design Issues with this great cover from Nicole. She provided us with a lot of great information and processes behind what you see. Love this cover!

Obsession

Unique Ideas

I thought Henry's design for Violence would be a great cover to preface the following discussion.

As book cover designers we are called to—obviously—convey the content of the book while displaying information that will be used to advertise the book itself, at least this is what book jackets were meant for in the first place, advertisement and protection. We are also—hopefully—called to display this information in some unique fashion. I believe that it is important to ask ourselves, no matter what practice of design we are in, what that unique quality is that we are bringing to our design, to each individual project. Is our idea unique, Our execution, our interpretation of an idea? Does each individual project we work on merit some unique quality? I certainly hope it would.

Back to Henry's cover for Violence. Henry takes this idea of violence and portrays it in an abstract, but still obvious, manner. Henry is solving his problem—to convey violence—in a unique way that one does not see every day. We aren't seeing people getting beaten with bats, shot with guns or screaming, we are shown the after affect of an act of violence. Unique!

So, what makes something unique? Is it one thing that we can pin down? Is it something we simply discover in the process?

Augusten Burroughs - "branding" discussion


Here are some titles written by Augusten Burroughs. I love this! It seems that the covers for Burroughs tie together by having a simple and powerful metaphor. From time to time we hear that the authors need to be branded by having the same typeface and arrangement of elements. However, if we look at Burroughs... he has a different face and arrangement on every composition. The content of every book is different (hopefully), so why would we need to showcase them the same? Do we want people to think he is the exact same in every book (isn't the point of branding to maintain consistency)? Perhaps...

Then we have authors like Grisham, who, probably benefit by having his name nearly the same all the time (that way his consumers can instantly find his book). Or maybe he just needs his name large... Or maybe his books are all similar enough that we don't need to get a sense of variety.

Sedaris has a great name treatment, it is same at all times, but I feel it conveys the author better than HUGE type. It is lowercase and spaced... very quite, smooth, and contemplative.

I have no clue where this discussion leads... Maybe I dislike when author's are branded in an uninteresting way that says nothing. But perhaps I am fine with an author being branded if it looks good. Perhaps I am just a bias designer who just wants to do what I want to do.

St. Cyborg's Cover Design

Designed by Tom Muller.

The book is about "13 mindbending SF shorts of alien teachers, pregnant SuperHeroines, a caretaker who runs an after-school chain-gang for miscreants, the scariest petshop in the world and much more...."

Below are some of Tom's responses to a few questions.

What was your process:
The process was pretty straight forward. The book was going to be the 'standard' TPB approach (full colour cover with B/W interior). I had browsed through the book, which is a collection of short stories, so there wasn't really a central character popping out, except the title, which also is the setting of the stories (it's a school).
So I had the idea of using the name and the iconography of a school crest but filtered through a 'robotic' theme if you will.

Did you do any other concepts outside of this chosen solution:
No, not really. I was experimenting at first with photographic/scanning bits of old cameras and cell phones to make up the robot, but the results were quite horrid (if I say so myself), so I decided to start from scratch and build the robot in illustrator.

For more of Muller's working process, click here.