Adrian Jackson's Blog: Covers to Cover

Let’s face it. University press books can be dry. Limited budgets and staff restraints limit the ability of small presses to compete with large non-fiction operations and their stylized book covers. Not that all covers from multi-million dollar companies are works of art.

Cruising through the University of Texas Press book catalog, I came upon two gems. The first, Cooking Texas Style by Candy Wagner and Sandra Marquez, resembles an old concert poster. The second, Viva Tequila! By Lucinda Hutson, has a giant tequila bottle.

Cooking Texas Style: Traditional Recipes from the Lone Star State (http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/wagckp.html) looks like it was printed with black, red, orange and yellow ink. Thirty years ago, it would have taken four passes through a single-color press to achieve the imperfect look of it and each color would have been given 24 hours to dry. In reality, I’m sure this book was printed on a modern, full color press, but I appreciate the nostalgia. The design works with the contents – traditional home cooking – and pays homage to the time this book was originally published.


Some artists interpret Mexican themes using what I call the San Antonio palette. These colors, often used to sell the idea of Tex-Mex, include magenta, cyan, orange, purple, lime green and yellow. This palette is so prevalent in Tex-Mex design that it is passé. The designer of the Viva Tequila!: Cocktails, Cooking and Other Agave Adventures (http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/hutviv.html) cover used these colors, but conservatively so that this cookbook doesn’t blend in with a thousand other Tex-Mex-themed books like it. The tequila bottle, with the title and author, are a gutsy and imaginative choice. If I saw this in a bookstore it would grab my attention. What seems, at first, to be a cyan starburst behind the bottle is a clever interpretation of the spiky agave plant.


Design Grades:

A//Both designers demonstrate restraint on the use of color. The positive impact of their decisions increases the value of each book and show that they put solid time into interpreting the contents.

A+//Three words – GIANT. TEQUILA. BOTTLE.

A+//The artist used two orange values on the flame. He or she could have used the same orange throughout the piece and no one would have complained, but making a value change gives the fire more movement that just its shape could convey.

Once a writer develops a canon, his or her subsequent book covers tend to take on a templated look. Ian Fleming’s Bond books – first editions (http://www.ianfleming.com) – are individualistic and very simply designed until From Russia With Love, which is the standard bearer for the rest of the collection with a couple of exceptions. Most of the books have a recurring slab of wood on the cover and colors are from a muted palette. While I appreciate the hand drawn artistry of these covers, a more recent collection caught my attention.

The book covers by artist Michael Gillette (http://www.michaelgillette.com/#/portfolio), done in 2008 for Penguin Books, are phenomenal! Sometimes artists are intimidated by a larger than life project like this one – a rerelease in celebration of Fleming’s birthday – but Gillette puts it all on the graphics table for these books. The covers have a swanky-pop ’60s and ’70s style that reminds me of old movie posters.


If you look at other iterations of Fleming’s Bond books, you’ll see what other artist do wrong when tasked with representing such high profile collection. After you laugh at the absurd recurrence of a red dot (current collection on Amazon), cruise over to Pinterest to savor Gillette’s work. Link here: http://pinterest.com/adjack2000/covers-to-cover

The iconic “Bond Girls” are featured on the cover collection in watercolor. Each cover color uses a different color scheme but they are all related by their subdued quality. The girls are sexy, sassy and funky. They are scantily clad or not clad at all, but tastefully done.

Design Grades:
A+// Once the artist made the decision to put Bond Girls on the cover, he could have gone cutesy with color choices, but he didn’t. He went weird, cheeky, and far outside of the box.

A+// Great continuity of the collection! Each cover has it’s own color palette but they all work together in harmony.

A+ // Excellent interpretation of each book with very little use of weaponry – two guns, one martini.

Extra Credit: Michael Gillette, you could have gone establishment with this kind of client, but chose to show talent and confidence instead. Head to the front of the class, sir.

I love to browse bookstore shelves judging covers. I love to study the covers and see if I can figure out how the artist's vision fits the writer's story. That's the perfect marriage of literature. The folks at the New York Times love book covers, too. If you are like them (and me), you'll love this slide show. If you aren't, well, how do you decide which books to buy?

Link: New York Times Favorite Book Covers of 2012

When the title of your book is, “How To Be Black,” there are only a few ways to go with cover design. HarperCollins Publishers decided on a deceptively simple white lettering on a black background designed by Lisa Stokes for Baratunde Thurston’s part autobiography/part social commentary. Just carrying this book around makes you seem like a radical.

The style of the cover is that of Paul Bacon’s Big Book Look. Bacon, a book cover design icon, made the “big title, big author look” popular. “How To Be Black,” the book cover comes off edgy and “in-yo-face!” Truthfully, the book is milder than what the cover leads you to believe. It is milk-through-your-nose funny and, if I can borrow Arsenio Hall’s bit for a minute, it makes you go “hmmmmm”.

A golden nugget in the design is on the back cover at the top where it says, “If You Don’t Buy This Book, You’re a Racist.” Perfection!

A+// Color evokes emotion, especially when “color” means “race”. Fantastic interpretation of the title.

B// The title stands out well, but the addition of the NYT Bestseller tag muddies it up a little. Of course, when you have a bestseller on your hands, you work it in.

A+// If I saw this on a shelf in a bookstore, would the spine grab my attention? You bet! Excellent design!

People love to look at faces. We make emotional connections with them, especially when they are babies or dogs. Fenji, the cover model of Maria Goodavage's Soldier Dogs: The Untold Story of America's Canine Heroes, is both cute and badass. The real-life canine soldier is dressed in Doggles to protect her eyes from irritation -- an unusual photo to those of us who know nothing about military working dogs. It's difficult to juxtapose cute and combat-ready, but that is exactly what designer Jaime Putorti did for Simon and Schuster.

The full photo is displayed prominently on Goodavage's website www.soldierdogs.com . The designer's decision to crop the photo was spot on since it brings the eyes directly to Fenji.

Design Grades:

A+ // Great application of Gestalt Principles demonstrated in the crop.

A+ // Excellent matching of design to subject matter.

A // Good use of the color green without going too far over to OD green.