Keep it Real

Lee Gutkind

Proposed cover for a book about writing creative nonfiction. In the end we went in another direction (below).

This is new YA series I am working on. Each story is told in the first person - single voice. The logo for series has been accepted but we are still working out cover designs. These are just roughs that were used to show how logo could work. The final design is coming along.

The Fate of the Nation State

Edited by Michel Seymour

Repairing Eden

Mark McLeod-Harrison

Watermelon Syrup

Annie Jacobsen

approval pending

This is a preliminary image for a novel that is about the crazy mixed up life of a man and his multiple concurrent marriages.

Approval pending

Title refers to small wax wish boats.

Just got approved. Illustration by the very talented Christoph Niemann



These are other ideas for the salon des refusés.

This one is approved. Below is another option I presented.

This is your Brain on Joy

Earl Henslin

approval pending


From the cover brief: The central theme of the book is the role played by resentment and revenge in the history – that is, the kind of resentment that emerges out of a form of humiliation or suffering experienced by an individual or group or even a nation, and that subsequently turns into an act of violence or revenge. I think we are going in a different direction on this one but I like the way the image interacts with the type to reinforce the theme of the book.

Animals

Don LePan

This cover is going into final production. From the back cover: Animals is a powerful novel set in an indeterminate future in which virtually all the species that humans have for millennia used as food have become extinct; the world this change creates is at once eerily foreign and disturbingly familiar.



I started by purchasing a set of dishes for $16.92 at Canadian Tire and went to work on my back porch









Line art for Delft china elements.

approval pending

I just sent this one off. The author, who is of Indian descent, played hockey on a woman's hockey team at a Canadian university and is still an avid hockey fan. I think the cover works on a number of levels but mostly I really like how it challenges notions of Canadian identity.

I Sing the Body Politic

Peter Swirski


Cowboy boots as bookends for the Bush Era.

From the back cover:

The end of George W. Bush's imperial presidency means that the wreckage of the republic's political ideals is now subject to a vigorous reassessment. In essays by five senior scholars, major works of American literature and film are analyzed in the context of a larger set of arguments about American injustice at home and across the empire.

"Though a unique combination of scholarship, readability, and what might be described as moral outrage, I Sing the Body Politic makes its point in a very telling way. Beautifully written, and based on an impressive amount of research, it casts a devastating light on the Bush administration and the political order in recent years."

I found this in the river at the back of our farm. It is part of old tree root that had grown around a small stone.

A really interesting blog for found images:
estupepidia

Divided Korea

Ronald Bleiker

I was given a selection of photographs to work from for this two colour cover. I really loathe duotones and whenever possible I like to use cropping and contrast to give the cover more impact.

approval pending

Very simple idea. I like how the pages separate between Canada and the U.S.

I am still working on this cover. We are going to go with another direction but there was something I liked about this. The book is about mean speech.

The author had taken some photographs of Los Angeles and I was given a selection to work with. This one caught my attention right away. There was something about the positioning of the Goodyear blimp above the red flower that was perfect. I had to rework the photograph quite a bit to make the red flower really pop.

This one is almost put to bed. In the end a simpler approach was called for. I used four different flourishes (worms) in the frame element so I still managed to get it on the cover albeit in a less off-putting way.

Kit Winemaking

Daniel Pambianchi



preliminary sketches

We did advanced review copies for this book and when I got first saw it my reaction was less than positive - it lacked finesse. I have reworked it for the final cover.

Before We had Words

S. P. Zitner

The kind of cover you could only get away with on a poetry book. Yes I know the type is really small.

Her Mothers Ashes

This one took quite a bit of back and forth to arrive at the final result. One of the reasons I kind of like the end result is that it doesn't look like one of my covers. I never would have considered using Bodoni Swashes as a cover font until I saw Barbara de Wilde's amazing Milk cover.

Weed Man

The Remarkable Journey of Jimmy Divine
John McCaslin

This printed and laminated cloth cover has a velum jacket that allows the art to show through. Jimmy's name is visible in the negative spaces between the leaves. I just picked it up at my P.O. box on the other side of the border and needless to say it raised a few eyebrows with the custom agents on the way back.

Canada’s Game

This one would fall into the category of just getting out of the way of a great photograph.

Mountain Tea

Peter Van Toorn



The font I used for this cover went out of circulation for a while but is back now. Wonky font for sure but the italic is kind of sweet.

Unusual approach for this poetry cover. The publisher went for the dye-cut holes which is pretty cool.

The Sheep are Back

I was hard at work staring at my computer screen when I looked to my left and remembered that the sheep are back. They migrate back and forth all day long outside my window.

Improvisation

Edward W. Sarah

I wanted the type on this cover to convey "improvisation" and thought reflecting it in the trombone would be interesting.

Pure Product

Quill and Quire, which is our version of Publishers Weekly, does a regular feature on the process of developing a cover. They asked me to do this for a recent poetry cover - Pure Product by Jason Guriel.

(A)
When I am designing a poetry cover I try and find images in the poems that lend themselves to visual expression. Pure product is a line in Guriel’s poem “Thinigness.” It is not always easy for me to describe the process I go through to create an image but there was just something about these old fashioned sprinklers I found in a hardware catalogue that seemed to fit for the notion of thinginess. Unfortunately it made for an unintended connection with the word “product” in the title – as if the sprinklers were the product. If the title had been “Thinginess” it might have worked.

(B)
This is an evolution of the previous direction. I thought that maybe the placement of the type could remove the connection between product and sprinkler but it just created another issue. Water could be interpreted as the “Pure Product”.

(C)
This image comes from another poem in the book “Shopping Cart, Abandoned on Front Lawn”. The shadows cast by the cart on the lawn create “subdivisions the ants won’t obey” I don’t think I ever presented this one because it still made an unintended connection with the title – shopping, consumerism.

(D)
I thought the idea of using a bell jar might be interesting – isolating the pure product. The press liked the image but felt something was missing - no “ahh” moment.



FINAL
From the poem Thinginess

“the necessary tubing
that defines
the nothing blowing
thru ducts.”

The image is an allusion to Magritte's “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. By opening the straw it solves the problem I encountered with (A) and (B). The straw is not the product. It just defines the nothing blowing thru it.

I worked on the shadows of the shopping cart option (C) for almost an entire day but couldn't get it to work. It reminded me of a point earlier in my career when I was working in Montreal for a design company. I was leaving the office at the end of the day and noticed another designer was hard at work on a logo - it wasn't working and the deadline was the next day. When I came back to work the next morning she was still at work and had been there all night struggling with the same version. It made me realize that you have to listen to your inner designer voice that tells you to put it aside and try something else. It doesn't matter how much effort you have put into any given solution, if it isn't working clear your desk and start again.

This raises another issue that we as designers are always asking ourselves - is it any good? If you work alone you can't bounce ideas off your fellow designers. It sounds a little silly but I work on a solution until I like it and then I present it. You almost have to be your own audience and trust your own reaction to the work.