David Drummond | covers

2012-02-11T04:16:00.000-08:00

This was my first stab at an illustration for an article on election reform.

2012-02-07T10:48:00.000-08:00

The AAUP (American Association of University Presses) Book, Jacket and Journal Show just announced their selected entries for 2012. Here are the covers of mine that got it.

2012-02-06T12:19:00.000-08:00

My ode to the 1970's hubcap. One of the stories in this collection features a clown at the annual Southeastern Michigan Clown Convention.

2012-02-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

For this cover I changed the background inside the silhouette to show more of a winter scene based on some feedback from the Violent World of Parker blog. The motel sign was finessed as well.

2012-02-02T08:46:00.000-08:00

This one is ready to go now. It will be matte lamination overall with spot varnish on yellow paint.

2012-01-27T03:11:00.001-08:00

2012-01-26T13:01:00.000-08:00

These are some exploratory ideas for a fashion retailer's catalogue. The brief was to include a butterfly in some way. The bottom one shows front and back cover.

2012-01-25T08:03:00.000-08:00

Off to the printer

2012-01-19T06:21:00.000-08:00

2012-01-14T03:49:00.000-08:00

O Magazine

2012-01-02T06:49:00.000-08:00

2011-12-21T04:34:00.001-08:00

2011-12-16T07:33:00.001-08:00

2011-12-10T10:19:00.001-08:00

The one below is the actual cover. The other one (sea serpent) was an also ran.

2011-12-09T09:09:00.000-08:00

From the brief: The notion that each person is the free author of his thoughts and actions, rests on a cognitive and emotional illusion. The red cover is the final one. The author suggested the idea of somehow using marionette strings and luckily the title had just the right number of letters in each word. Two preliminary ideas are below.

2011-12-08T08:24:00.001-08:00

Every designer has at least one old-style/poster type only cover. I guess this is mine.

2011-12-06T12:33:00.001-08:00

2011-12-02T03:38:00.001-08:00

Just finished the third one in this series.

2011-11-29T02:43:00.001-08:00

2011-11-27T11:16:00.001-08:00

2011-11-24T05:37:00.001-08:00

2011-11-21T05:27:00.001-08:00

From the back of my book shelf

2011-11-20T04:27:00.001-08:00

Fresh from the printers

2011-11-18T14:27:00.001-08:00

I didn't really think they would go for a real heart on the cover but I gave it a shot. The book chronicles a father's experience with his infant son's serious heart disease. In the end we went with a 3D rendering by the illustratorJeannie Saylor who was nice enough to let us use it on the cover.

2011-11-15T07:06:00.000-08:00

2011-11-13T13:42:00.000-08:00

Illustration for NY Times Magazine

2011-11-09T14:46:00.000-08:00

From the brief: “Sumptuary laws in 17th century France were the legislated rules that determined what a person was permitted to wear according to his or her social rank. Capitalism exercises the same kind of absolutism, dictating the polarities of rich and poor, luxury and necessity, splendour and squalor.” This is a poetry cover.

2011-11-09T02:12:00.000-08:00

2011-11-08T02:38:00.000-08:00

From the brief: "According to legend, Achilles used the plant yarrow during the Battle of Troy to help treat wounds. This is how the poet is using the plant in her title: to treat the wound of mortality."

2011-11-01T06:43:00.000-07:00

2011-10-28T02:54:00.000-07:00

I designed 20 of the Richard Stark (Parker) novels for the University of Chicago Press and they asked me to design the Grofield ones as well - The Dame, The Damsel, Blackbird and Lemons Never Lie. The 4 Alan Grofield novels work in tandem with the Parker novels.They wanted a visual connection to the first series but also wanted them to stand on their own.

Instead of a gun silhouette as the identifying motif I went for a silhouette of a "dame" - intentionally cheesy - to highlight the fact that these novels are kind of pulp-y and are a little more about women and relationships. I inverted the visual content from the first series and put the illustrative elements inside the silhouette. The first option below was a deemed a little too cool and sci-fi looking.

I went back to the gun motif but updated the style of revolver because these novels take place in the late sixties and early seventies. They wanted Richard Stark to stand out more as well. I thought it would be cool to treat his name as though it were a cheap motel sign from that era. The idea would be to have a different sign for each of the four novels. I also injected more colour as befitting the time period.

This option had to be reined in a bit because we were moving too far away from the Parker series and there had to be a stronger connection. Richard Stark's name, a huge selling point, had to be more standardized and quickly recognizable. I went back to the woman silhouette and used the motel sign idea for Richard Stark but treated it the same on all of them.

2011-10-26T10:30:00.001-07:00

2011-10-25T11:56:00.001-07:00

2011-10-23T13:22:00.000-07:00

2011-10-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

The author suggested the idea of a double umbrella which is alluded to in the book. I must have spent my entire Saturday trying an assortment of umbrellas with different rain effects but couldn't get the right tone for this book on Dante and medieval culture. The one with the black background was where I arrived at the end of the day - kind of static and lifeless. After putting it aside for the rest of the weekend I gave another stab at it this morning in the style of Leonardo's sketches.

2011-10-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

This is book 3 in this series

2011-10-11T13:11:00.000-07:00

2011-10-05T11:06:00.000-07:00

These two just went through for the same press. The first one is a fictionalized memoir. The main character is a reporter for a yiddish press in New York. The author asked if Don Quixote could be worked into the cover somehow.

2011-10-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

Work in progress
The title for this book of poetry is The Little Yellow House, in reference to Van Gogh's house in Arles. The titles of the poems are all the titles of his paintings

2011-09-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

Sketch for upcoming catalogue cover. Hand lettering will remain but final will use textured papers.

2011-09-28T08:12:00.000-07:00

View collection

2011-09-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

Big Oil as rapacious sea serpent. Another one for the Salon des refusés

This is the source photograph from Shutterstock.

2011-09-27T05:59:00.000-07:00

Book covers to flour bags - just got this from the printers.

2011-09-26T04:33:00.000-07:00

I am sure every cover designer can relate to this. How many times are you supplied with a black and white image for a cover and have to make it visually interesting? I don't think I have another duotone effect left in my arsenal. I really liked this image of an aboriginal youth striking an Elvis pose for a book on aboriginal music in Canada - not the kind of image usually associated with this kind of music - but couldn't get it to work using duotones, tritones, sepiatone etc. Instead, I played around with it in Photoshop by adding colour and filters and arrived at something more graphically interesting. This is still a work in progress and needs some finessing but I like where it is going.

New Web Site

2011-09-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

After 10 years I figured it was time to update my website

The Boy

2011-09-19T06:04:00.001-07:00

Betty Jane Hegerat

This is a work of fiction based on the murder case of Robert Cook, who in 1959 murdered his entire family. From the back cover: ...the author and her narrator engage in a dialogue that explores what drives a young boy to murder, and what ultimately constitutes reality and fiction.

The cover image is a crime scene photo of the families shoes.

2011-09-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

Went in another direction but this was one of the initial sketches.

2011-09-16T06:18:00.000-07:00

Cover art for a book on the history of Portland.

2011-09-06T13:16:00.000-07:00

another work in progress

I found an old school furniture catalogue which happened to cover the period in the book perfectly.

2011-09-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

Work in progress

As is often the case with scholarly books this cover came with suggested artwork (below). For the me the challenge is always finding a new way of presenting it. In this case I wanted to show her dual lives.

2011-09-04T04:12:00.000-07:00

One from a couple of years back.

2011-08-28T05:16:00.000-07:00

Art that I am working on for a book the debunks the myth that China is buying the world.

2011-08-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

John Bertram and Marco Sonzogni are publishing a book on Lolita covers and asked a slew of cover designers to contribute conceptual covers. Here is mine.

2011-08-18T05:17:00.000-07:00

Final cover for this one with two preliminary sketches below. The brief was to convey "typographic man".

2011-08-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

This is another one for the salon des refusés. The book is about abortion law in the United States. Ampersand as fetus - maybe a bit of stretch.

2011-08-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

According to the brief it was important to convey the negative, destructive aspects of lying on society.

2011-08-06T05:15:00.000-07:00

work in progress

I spent the afternoon looking through the Library of Congress's online collection of Civil War photographs. I must have looked at about 1000 before settling on this one. I kept going back though to the photograph of Lincoln's chair that he was sitting in when assassinated.

2011-08-02T12:46:00.000-07:00

This was the first sketch I proposed for this cover. A book of the collected prefaces to the novels of Henry James.

2011-08-01T04:42:00.000-07:00

work in progress

2011-07-21T07:00:00.001-07:00

off to the printers

Baie de l’ours, Laurentians

2011-07-10T04:41:00.001-07:00

6:00 A.M.

2011-07-08T09:44:00.000-07:00

What is it with mason jars and book cover designers? This was from a while back.

2011-07-07T09:30:00.000-07:00

New guide book in same series as the one below.

50/50

2011-07-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

This one got into 50/50 this year.

2011-06-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

A recent scholarly book. I extended the backdrop around the bricklayer to isolate the figure more - like an Irving Penn portrait.

2011-06-27T10:30:00.001-07:00

We went in a different direction in the end but this was one of the initial sketches for this cover. It is a little stark for a trade book but I thought it was kind of fun.

2011-06-20T07:31:00.000-07:00

Illustration for a cover I am working on about Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press. My intention was to have this letterform printed letterpress and photograph it for the final art.

2011-06-13T14:28:00.001-07:00

What I really like about the final cover chosen for this non-fiction book is that it defies the clichés for the genre - open roads, big skies, dramatic scenery. I presented a couple of those as options, as you can see below, but in the end the choice was made to go for a more conceptual approach that gets to the heart of the story of an iron butt who rides his motorcycle non stop from Alaska to the Florida panhandle, averaging about 1500 miles a day. I wanted the cover to convey the obsessive nature of the quest, without necessarily showing the motorcycle. The author suggested having the odometer show the actual increases in mileage as day moved to night and back again.

2011-06-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

This is a logo I am working on for a violin maker.

2011-05-30T06:38:00.000-07:00

Forkhill Protestants, Forkhill Catholics

2011-05-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

A social history of protestants and catholics in Forkhill parish on the Ulster borderlands between 1787 and 1858. The author contends that there was a greater degree of cooperation and exchange between Catholics and Protestants than the historical record has acknowledged. One house, two chimneys, both faiths.

Journals

2011-05-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

I have done a couple of journal redesigns recently and love the challenge of showing "different but the same" as my old boss used to say. The treatment is based on the cover of XXe Siecle magazine from 1938 (below).

2011-05-18T06:37:00.001-07:00

I was backing up some old covers and came across this one again. The biggest pitfall when doing scholarly books are those wordy titles and subtitles - how to manage all that type. I love it when they keep it to a minimum like this.

2011-05-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

2011-05-13T11:01:00.001-07:00

Blogger was having technical problems yesterday and this post got deleted.

2011-05-11T05:13:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite presses is celebrating their 50th year. They were among my first clients and I have been doing their covers for the last 15 years - roughly 120 and counting. This is their current catalogue cover that I just designed.

2011-05-11T05:04:00.000-07:00

This novel has lots of rock and roll references and deals with the tragic end of a friendship. I like the fact that a scratch on an album is like a memory.

2011-05-06T11:13:00.000-07:00

This is for a cover I am working on that is a diary but not in the typical autobiographical sense. The title reflects that in a tongue-in-cheek manner. I immediately thought of that iconic Magritte painting.

2011-05-05T07:22:00.000-07:00

2011-05-05T07:15:00.000-07:00

This is an illustration for a book cover I am working on. The photographs supplied were all black and white and the publisher wanted to jazz it up a bit.

2011-04-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

2011-04-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

Work in progress

Cover art for a scholarly book that deals with the problems that arise when Identity driven theories of group rights are relied on to settle legal claims.

Men’s Health Magazine

2011-04-25T03:54:00.000-07:00

2011-04-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

work in progress

2011-04-08T03:28:00.000-07:00

This one was fun to work on. Poetry cover as boxing poster. The first one featured a heart but was off the mark. The poems are more about the poet boxing with herself.

2011-04-08T03:27:00.000-07:00

Off to the printer.

2011-04-07T04:56:00.000-07:00

This one went through a couple of options before getting it right. Written after a near-fatal medical emergency, the poems express gratitude at being alive but are also undercut by confusion and ambivalence with an acute sense of mortality. I liked the image of the horse swimming out to save a drowning person – how useful could a horse be under those circumstances – but the feeling was that it was too literal. The "gift horse" is existence itself.

2011-04-07T02:51:00.000-07:00

work in progress

2011-04-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

2011-04-04T06:06:00.000-07:00

From a cover design on rural schools in China in the early 1900's in the morning to a design for a flour bag the afternoon. All in a days work.

2011-04-01T03:55:00.000-07:00

work in progress

2011-03-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

Unused illustration for an article on crying at the office.

2011-03-29T05:21:00.000-07:00

We have had a total of 6 dogs since we moved out to the farm in 1995, and actually just acquired another stray we found curled up in a snowbank on the side of the road. This door shows part of that history. Two rotten westies were responsible for the scratches below the handle and my friend Beau for the ones above it.

2011-03-29T02:33:00.000-07:00

work in progress

2011-03-23T04:58:00.000-07:00

work in progress

I think for this one I was really just looking for an excuse to buy that Strangelove font.

2011-03-18T09:48:00.001-07:00

This is the secondary illustration for the same article below.

2011-03-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

logo project in progress

I am working on this logo for my local library. The library is no longer little and it isn't green anymore so the challenge was to find a way of showing both the history of the library while also highlighting the fact that it has moved into a new larger facility.

Men’s Health Magazine

2011-03-14T12:01:00.000-07:00

This is my current wallet used in an Illustration for the April issue of Men's Health. My old wallet made an appearance on a book cover.

2011-03-11T03:33:00.001-08:00

work in progress

source image

2011-03-09T10:16:00.000-08:00

This image was developed for another cover that was never used. It just seemed right for this book.