From the brief: “The main character in Nabokov’s last novel is the corpulent Philip Wild who is preoccupied with his own death and obliterates himself, from the toes upwards, through meditation - a deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.” The manuscript was published posthumously against the wishes of Nabokov who wanted it burned.

This cover went through a bit of an evolution. The first option showing a map of Mexico was looking flat and uninteresting and wasn’t conveying much of the content of the book. The second had a kind of Tarantino feel to it but was still not conveying a key part of the book.

Part of my ongoing quest  to make Canadian history books more enticing. O.D. Skelton was undersecretary of state for Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Invariably a black and white photograph is supplied. I am now constitutionally incapable of just adding a duotone effect.

Cloth stamping for a recent cover.

Book deals with myth and reality of Canadian muliculturalism.

Number 4 in this series.

Schweitzer and his crazy eyebrows.

From the brief: The subject of the book is the origins in the 1920s of the first and most influential of the twentieth century's theories about how to read English poetry. Among other things, it required readers to be aware of all the meanings and uses every word in a poem ever had.

AAUP 2013

6 of my covers were selected for the AAUP (American Association of University Presses) Book, Jacket and Journal Show.

Shelia Fischman is a distinguished and award winning translator who has translated some of the most prominent french Québecois author’s works into english. Very simple understated idea. I wanted to show that nothing is lost in translation from french to english

Foil stamping for Time in Time by Mark Smith

Final on this one

Journal design

Kind of sums up how I feel every time I start a new cover design.

This is a novel about a wrenching divorce set in the late sixties. 

This is a visual for a book cover where the main character has an Audrey Hepburn obsession and has hundreds of photographs of her on his bedroom wall. 

The idea for this cover originated in discussions with my sister, the author.  She wanted the cover to convey this key part of the manuscript; “Gezerah: A rabbinical enactment issued as a guard or preventive measure; also a prohibition or restriction generally; from the root “gazar” (to cut; to decide). The term is especially applied to a negative ordinance which the Rabbis instituted as a guard or a fence (“geder”) to shore up a Biblical precept.” Below is the photo I took to base the illustration on.

I just finished this logo for a trattoria located in a small village between Owl’s Head and Jay Peak in rural Québec. The village is known for its three churches – les trois cloches.

Another one for the Salon des refusés. They asked for a goat on the cover. I really liked the idea that the hand and shadow don’t match.

Turkish edition of Soldiers of Salamis, a novel about the Spanish Civil war.

Comps for a journal cover I am working on.

Hit the Road Jack

Essays on the Culture of the American Road

Only stipulation was to put a goat on the cover.

They wanted this cover to be a riff on vintage jazz album covers.

From the brief: “The book is organized around the series of poems about various grey totes belonging to different members of the poet’s family. It is a collection of elegies on the death, in quick succession, of her father and mother - lessons in goodbye, she calls them. ”

Visual for a cover about a love affair in a Hollywood studio during the silver screen era.

Recent cover for a Turkish publisher I just started working with. Title translates roughly as “the faster I go the less I have”

This is the final cover for this book by the brilliant Josh Freed. The option with the skull below was my first crack at it.

Valgrain

Ok so it’s not a book cover but how many designers can put “feed bag” on their resumés. Most feed bags are just one or two colours, badly printed with a generic cow or chicken graphic on them. Living in farm country I have seen a lot of them. The printer we used for this job started off by saying that rubber printing plates would have a hard time fitting the coloured sections together without gaps occurring, but in his hesitation to say “absolutely not”, I saw an opportunity. It took a whole day on press to get the registration right and in the end it really paid off. I love it when a printer is up for a challenge.