The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Art Director: Emily Mahon // Doubleday
Photographer: Simon Lee

about this book
A mesmerizing narrative about the rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss

In the 1980s, a wave of Chinese from Fujian province began arriving in America. Like other immigrant groups before them, they showed up with little money but with an intense work ethic and an unshakeable belief in the promise of the United States. Many of them lived in a world outside the law, working in a shadow economy overseen by the ruthless gangs that ruled the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown.

The figure who came to dominate this Chinese underworld was a middle-aged grandmother known as Sister Ping. Her path to the American dream began with an unusual business run out of a tiny noodle store on Hester Street. From her perch above the shop, Sister Ping ran a full-service underground bank for illegal Chinese immigrants. But her real business-a business that earned an estimated $40 million-was smuggling people.

As a “snakehead,” she built a complex—and often vicious—global conglomerate, relying heavily on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs to protect her power and profits. Like an underworld CEO, Sister Ping created an intricate smuggling network that stretched from Fujian Province to Hong Kong to Burma to Thailand to Kenya to Guatemala to Mexico. Her ingenuity and drive were awe-inspiring both to the Chinatown community—where she was revered as a homegrown Don Corleone—and to the law enforcement officials who could never quite catch her.

Indeed, Sister Ping’s empire only came to light in 1993 when the Golden Venture, a ship loaded with 300 undocumented immigrants, ran aground off a Queens beach. It took New York’s fabled “Jade Squad” and the FBI nearly ten years to untangle the criminal network and home in on its unusual mastermind.

THE SNAKEHEAD is a panoramic tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground economy in which America’s twelve million illegal immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream. The Snakehead offers an intimate tour of life on the mean streets of Chinatown, a vivid blueprint of organized crime in an age of globalization and a masterful exploration of the ways in which illegal immigration affects us all.

Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie / A Picador Paperback Original

Photo-illustration by Marc Yankus

Beginning on August 9, 1945, in Nagasaki, and ending in a prison cell in the US in 2002, as a man is waiting to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of love and betrayal.

Hiroko Tanaka is twenty-one and in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. As she steps onto her veranda, wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, her world is suddenly and irrevocably altered. In the numbing aftermath of the atomic bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new beginnings, two years later, Hiroko travels to Delhi. It is there that her life will become intertwined with that of Konrad's half sister, Elizabeth, her husband, James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu.

With the partition of India, and the creation of Pakistan, Hiroko will find herself displaced once again, in a world where old wars are replaced by new conflicts. But the shadows of history--personal and political--are cast over the interrelated worlds of the Burtons, the Ashrafs, and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York and, in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound these families together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.

The title Burnt Shadows refers to the crane shaped patterns from the protagonist's kimono that was burnt onto her back when she was exposed to the atomic blast while in Nagasaki waiting for her German officer lover. Whew. It represented a constant reminder of the world she lost and marked her as an outsider trying to find happiness but is swept up in historical events. Instead of trying to illustrate the epic scope of the story, I wanted to focus on that. But it could easily turn out looking grotesque. I needed to find a more painterly and beautiful approach to creating the image.
Marc Yankus is always dropping by my office to show me his beautiful photographs. They're more like paintings. Really stunning. I'm always looking for a project that we could work on together and this seemed perfect.


Marc had his close friend Minnie pose for him. Focusing on the back of the woman, she couldn't appear too provocative but had to appear as if she was baring her soul and her shame. A moment of intimate trust. Of the contact sheet, this shot of Min looked particularly vulnerable. We then looked for crane references. Most of the stock art and Dover books sources were too stiff and graphic. I wanted something more painterly and soft. I thought that kimonos would be a good bet. But oddly enough, we had a difficult time finding kimonos with the right crane patterns. We looked all over NYC. We checked kimono stores, the famous Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya, a private dealer of Japanese rare prints, the New York Public Library Picture Collection but none were right. It seemed easier to recreate it ourselves. So I hired my go to image maker Philip Pascuzzo to create a flying crane and ocean waves in the style of Japanese woodblock prints. Marc then took Phil's drawings and arranged them into his composition. The wooden bracket from a piece of Marc's furniture was added to the back cover to suggest the India portion of the story.
I kept the type solution quiet.
The gradient sky was inspired by the Japanese screen painter Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).

Illustrations by Philip Earl Pascuzzo:






An interview with author Kamila Shamsie:


Kamila Shamsie on using Google Maps to help with research for novel writing

Burnt Shadows Reading Group Guide

The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides / Picador

Cover photograph by Justine Kurland // Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Juxtaposing the most common and the most gothic, the humorous and the tragic, Jeffrey Eugenides creates a vivid and compelling portrait of youth and lost innocence. He takes us back to the elm-lined streets of suburbia in the seventies, and introduces us to the men whose lives have been forever changed by their fierce, awkward obsession with five doomed sisters: brainy Therese, fastidious Mary, ascetic Bonnie, libertine Lux, and pale, saintly Cecilia, whose spectacular demise inaugurates "the year of the suicides." This is the debut novel that caused a sensation and won immediate acclaim from the critics--a tender, wickedly funny tale of love and terror, sex and suicide, memory and imagination.

The cover of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which I designed with Olga Grlic, is still one of my favorite designs and favorite books. So when Picador got the rights to republish The Virgin Suicides in paperback, I was excited to get the chance to repackage it.




Great typography huh?

I absolutely loved Sofia Coppola's debut film version of the book. So it was hard not to be influenced by the look and tone of the movie. I wanted to stay away from depicting any direct scenes from the book and go with images that suggested the spirit of the writing. Jeffrey and my Publisher also wanted to go for a modern American classic look.

Working with a limited budget, commissioning a new piece would be difficult so I looked for artist that dealt with similar themes in their work. Hoping to find something in their collection that would resonate sympathetically.

Jeffrey had suggested the Dutch photographer and video artist, Rineke Dijkstra. She photographed an early series of adolescent bathers in the United States and Eastern Europe in 1992 that dealt with their discomfort over their bodies. Children who seem at odds with their own bodies as they confront puberty. I contacted her representative at the Marian Goodman Gallery and we looked over her work and selected this image entitled, "Hel, Poland, August 12, 1998". Even though it didn't have a direct link to the story, it captured the mood.



Reineke's image was gorgeous but it was decided that a young girl in a bathing suit was too far away from the book. I remembered when we were brainstorming for MIDDLESEX, Jeffrey had suggested using one of sculpture/performance/video artist Matthew Barney pieces from his Cremaster Cycle on the cover. Interesting idea because they both dealt with early moments of sexual development that represented a condition of pure potentiality. But it would just be too disconnecting to most readers.

Another photographer that I had worked with on a previous book, Serious Girls came to mind. Justine Kurland, the fine-art photographer. She first became known for a series that depicted fierce feral teenage girls running wild in nature that addressed female identity without appearing passive or seductive.
I thought she would be perfect for this.

I got in touch with Justine's gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash and asked if they had anything that would be related to the book. They were very helpful. Justine sent me two images that she thought would work.

This image entitled MIDSUMMER NIGHT:



Beautiful and appropriate. But I loved her second image entitled ORCHARD:



It wasn't depicting anything that actually happened but was a visualization of a group of young men's nostalgia for the unattainable girls of their youth. The Lisbon sisters of their memory. Below, Justine describes in an email her inspiration for the photo after I sent the comps to Jeffrey.

hi henry,

great. I hope something works out. I loved that book, and actually read it the same time I was making the girl pictures. my favorite part, which was completely missing from the movie, was the hyperbolic fantasy life of girls imagined from the point of view of the boys, forever unknowable. for that, my strongest recommendation would be "the orchard"

How about that? It was as if I commissioned her for this book. It all came together nicely in the end. My Publisher and I loved it, and so did Jeffrey and his wife. DeLUX.


A Video Conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides in The New York Times Book Review
The author discussed his celebrated novels, "The Virgin Suicides" and "Middlesex," and the decline of his hometown, Detroit, with Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review.
Jeffrey's opening words warmed my heart. :) <3


NPR: All Things Considered
Listen Now 'The Virgin Suicides': Inspired By Detroit's Woes?

Flying

by Eric Kraft // A Picador Paperback Original

Cover photograph by Scott Nobles
Plane blueprint illustration on Back Cover by Philip Earl Pascuzzo

Critics have compared Eric Kraft to Proust, Pynchon, and Fred Astaire—an artful, slyly intelligent, wildly inventive observer of Americana. Now Eric Kraft has landed an ambitious comedy set both in our present and in an alternative 1950s universe—Flying.

It is the tail end of the 1950s, and in the town of Babbington, New York, a young dreamer named Peter Leroy has set out to build a flying motorcycle, using a design ripped from the pages of Impractical Craftsman magazine. This two-wheeled wonder will carry him not only to such faraway places as New Mexico and the Summer Institute in Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry, but deep into the heart of commercialized American culture, and return him to Babbington a hero. More than forty years later, as Babbington is about to rebuild itself as a theme park commemorating his historic flight, Peter must return home to set the record straight, and confess that his flight did not match the legend that it inspired.

Author Eric Kraft has always been our undiscovered gem. We had previously published over five titles in another series based around his character Peter Leroy. Like his stories, the books were packaged around retro and nostalgia. They were all Illustrated beautifully and whimsically by collage artist Marty Blake and were designed in a visually connective series format. But for some reason they didn't sell as well as we hoped. And when books don't sell, it's usually blamed on the jacket. But when they do well, the jacket had nothing to do with it. But that's another story.





All illustrations by Marty Blake // All designs by Henry Sene Yee

For his latest series Flying, it was published as a planned trilogy with the first two books already released in hardcover by St. Martin's Press. To give the books more attention, it was decided to skip the release of the third book as a hardcover and publish all three as a one volume original paperback book instead. And repackage it with a new look that didn't rely on retro and nostalgia. I wanted to strip all that away. Make it clean and take the focus off of the objects in the character's past and instead place the emphasis on the emotions of the character. The main character is a Big Dreamer. He builds a plane in his garage out of junkyard scraps and repurposed motorcycle parts until he finally takes flight and reaches for his dreams amongst the clouds...or does he?

The book made me think of the Terry Gilliam movie, BRAZIL. The visuals and the nihilistic Orwellian tones left an impression on me when I first saw it. I remembered the dream sequence where Jonathan Pryce's character escapes his oppressive life and sees himself as an armored angel flying through clouds. Up there he sees his love interest floating ethereally amongst the clouds. I thought this scene resonated with the book and man's state of mind. The images of clean, billowy clouds and blue skies. A future seen through Steampunk sensibilities.



I pictured a plane taking flight through these idealized dreamy clouds, going off page until you just see its tail section. When you followed it onto the spine and back cover, you saw that it wasn't flying, but resting on cinder blocks on a hilltop. Showing that this plane never really got off the ground. I've been wanting to work with photographer Scott Nobles for some time. While talking over the concept, the original idea of the front end of the plane resting on a hill would be difficult to visualized. The angle was wrong. It would end up looking as if it crashed into the hill instead of resting on it. Looking through Scott's website, I saw that he worked with ephemera and paper as textures in his photos. We came up with the idea that the back cover, that represented the reality, would work as a blueprint. This would also put across that it was a dream that was never realized past the planning stage. Plus, it would carry the conceptual themes from front to back. Plane to plan, blue skies with white clouds to blueprints with white lines. I decided that we could use some retro as long as we kept it to the back. Scott found some model planes online and I hired Phil Pascuzzo to create the plane schematics and it all came together nicely.

Wraparound French Flap with Rough Front Paperback:


Scott's Test Shots:


Model Plane:


Phil's Blueprint Drawing:


Scott's Alternate Clouds.

These clouds had a great mood. But I wanted them to be clumpy and tangible. I thought that would better suggest graspable dreams than an overall, even spread of puffery. And I also wanted to have some groups of clouds so that I could interact with the title type.

The Terror Dream

by Susan Faludi // Picador

Illustration by Andrea Dezsö

This New York Times Op-Ed piece, America's Guardian Myth written by the author Susan Faludi explains the book better than I can.


NY Public Library Picture Collection

This was a difficult subject to package. I wanted to focus on one aspect of the book and I chose the "Heroic Cowboy" myth. Where women needed men's protection and men were able to provide it. This was the turning point where America's persona was formed. I thought using a classic John Wayne pose as a silhouette would be an arresting image. But it was determined that it wasn't saying enough of what the book was about. It had to look epic and expansive. The only way to portray the story that my Publisher wanted was to depict the entire history with multiple images. From Pre-Revolutionary America where homesteads were attacked, the women kidnapped with nothing that the men could do to protect them. To the growing myth of the cowboy savior, hopeful stories of the cowboy defeating the Indians and protecting the women, to the resurgence of that ideal in Post-9/11 America and heroic rescue of Private Lynch. But this was beginning to sound like a recipe for image/story overload.

My first device to contain all of these ideas was to create a shadow box or diorama of these scenes. Looking through them as if we were peering through history. I had recently seen the Kara Walker exhibition at the Whitney Museum and I was blown away by her animated shadow puppet films. So graphic and full of energy. I had started seeing Illustrator Andrea Dezsö work around in magazines and went to her web site. The range of her visual expression was amazing. She had the technique, style and flow that I thought would be perfect in telling this complex story in a simpler form.
I called her up and it turned out that she was already familiar with the book because she had illustrated the author's New York Times Op-Ed piece. So from the start, I felt confident about the two of us tackling this project together.
After several brainstorming discussions, we soon scrapped the idea of a dimensional picture box because it was unnecessarily complicated and decided to try this on one level.

Below are Andrea's sketches and her email comments.


Andrea: I did a layered composition where the layers represent time periods from the past (top) to the present (bottom). The top shows different versions of the "fight with the indians" story. In some scenes the cowboy is the rescuer in others the cowboy is huddling behind the tree and the woman fights.
The bottom layer refers to the Jessica Lynch rescue fiction by US
Special troops.

Me: Beautiful! But too busy and too much story to figure out. Let's edit it down and concentrate on just 3 aspects.


Andrea: (Top): women fight indians (I took the guys out from here because I wanted to concentrate on the bravery of women and show them in an unusual way as fighters also to contrast that image more with the ones where men rescue women) (Middle): Cowboy myth--cowboy rescues woman (Bottom): GIs rescue Jessica Lynch reference or the contemporary myth.
I think the images can go as one continuous block or be cut into 3 scenes however it would fit your typography better. I LOVE the stark stripped-down to the essence black and white idea:

Me: The Jessica Lynch/hospital bed story isn't coming across. I don't want to include the burning twin towers. But in the end, this was the terrible moment that President Bush used to justify his actions. So let's try fitting that in:


Me: It works, but please remove the 2nd plane.

The sketches were then photographed to suggest the original diorama box idea and to feel like a nightmare seen through a television:



Alternate comps:

Too small on the page.

Nice but too ghostly and wintery.

The final cover was printed as a 4/C over Metallic Silver Ink, PMS 877 with Glossy Film Lamination.

Authors@Google presents Susan Faludi // September 11, 2008

Designing a Book Cover: 101

Designing a Book Cover-101 from Henry Yee on Vimeo.

(Click on the link DESIGNING A BOOK COVER-101 to go to the Vimeo site to view a larger, higher-res version)

Back in early 2001, I was asked to give a presentation to our Sales Department at the St. Martin's Press / Picador Sales Conference to describe very simply, what went into designing a book cover. I chose the topic of working with different types of art. Showing one example each of working with an illustrator, a photographer and creating artwork myself. Since this was done in 2001, you'll notice I made note of the use of the emerging new technologies that were starting to change the way we did things. Sketches sent to me electronically via email, Using eBay and the Internet as a source for research, taking portraits using a digital camera instead of shooting on film for instant viewing and cost savings, and retouching digitally. This was also the first time I used PowerPoint and I enjoyed working with the different ways you could transition between one element to the next to convey the story. Although in exporting the PowerPoint as a movie, I lost many of the subtle scene shifts. So I'm presenting it as is. It may be a little hard to follow without me narrating. But you'll get the general idea. I added the music to fill in the dead space.

Cover 01: DOUBLE TROUBLE by Greil Marcus / Illustrated by Steven Stines
Cover 02: TRIALS OF THE MONKEY by Matthew Chapman / Photo-illustration by Daniel Lee
Cover 03: DARLING? by Heidi Jon Schmidt / Illustrated by Henry Sene Yee
Music: POSSIBLY MAYBE by Björk / POST

Columbine

by Dave Cullen

Art Director: Flamur "Flag" Tonuzi // Twelve Books - Grand Central Publishing

Photograph by: Steve Peterson / ZUMA Press

• An AIGA's 50 Books // 50 Covers Best Cover Selection
• An Art Directors Club GOLD Winner
• A Type Directors Club Winner
• A readerville.com Most Coveted Covers Selection, No. 215

The Original News photo:

Apr 24, 1999 - Littleton, Colorado, USA - Columbine High School Shooting: Columbine High School southwest corner shortly after shooting. Windows are boarded up from the gun fire at The Columbine High School shooting where two teenage gunmen fatally shot 12 classmates and a teacher before killing themselves, on April 20, 1999. Front area of Columbine High School where Harris and Kledblod opened fire on students and teachers.

I thought that like 9/11, this was a regular day in the life of a regular high school. I wanted to depict the banality of school life. Lockers, linoleum floor tiles, classrooms, students shuffling between classes.
At first I used stock images of school hallway:






They were looking too pretty, too much poetry. Is that possible? And I thought if I continued this approach, it wouldn't make sense if I didn't use an image from the actual Columbine high school. These comps used photos of the school's actual hallway and library:


I also had to explore using the classroom video feed taken during the shooting. But I already knew it would have been too exploitative and painful to use on the final jacket:


In the end, I didn't want to say anything or felt the need to frame the book in any Point-of-View. What really needs to be said? The Publisher had already set the tone for me. As far as the cover copy, there was no author's name, no descriptive subtitle, no high school, just the word COLUMBINE on the front cover. That said it all. So I pulled all the way out of the school's interior and used an exterior news photo of the high school that photo-researcher Laura Wyss found for me. I made it as small as I could and cropped out any distracting elements and set it low on the page. I extended the gray skies heavenward and set the title small and floating in knock out white from a light sky. The contrast was subtle. K.I.S.S. Keep It Subtle Stupid. Hopefully the dramatically haunting spareness will draw you in. The final has a matte lamination with the title in spot gloss to punch it out a little. Because you still gotta read it from across the room.
I was told that the Sales department wanted to change the type solution to make it more legible because they were worried that the cover wouldn't reproduce well in Amazon. So we just made a darker JPEG version for the web. Talk about the tail wagging the dog. But thankfully the Publishers loved it just the way it was. Me too.



This is the second book cover I designed for Grand Central Publisher's new TWELVE imprint. The first being The Man Who Wanted Everything: Michael Ovitz and the Dark Dreams of Hollywood. And BOTH have won the Type Directors' Club Award for typographic excellence. How suh-WEET is that? Big thanks goes to the Creative Director Anne Twomey and my Art Director Flamur "Flag" Tonuzi. Although I've known Flag for years since we went to NYC's School of Visual Arts/SVA together, this was the first time we've worked together.

Here's Flag with a head of hair during Senior Year in the Design Workshop of SVA showing off some kind of big conceptual thingy design:

2009 New York Book Show Winner

I am pleased to announce that the Picador Art Department had some winning entries in the 2009 New York Book Show in the category of

General Trade / Quality Paperback for Individual Book Cover Design:

SECOND PLACE COVER:
John Lydon's ROTTEN // Picador


THIRD PLACE COVER:
Yoko Ogawa's THE DIVING POOL // Picador


MERIT AWARD COVER:
Slavoj Zizek's VIOLENCE // Picador


And one of my freelance jobs for Twelve / Grand Central Publishers, Art Directed by Flamur Tonuzi.
In the category of General Trade / Hardcover Nonfiction for Individual Book Jacket Design:

SECOND PLACE JACKET:
Dave Cullen's COLUMBINE // Twelve / Grand Central Publishers

I'll post more about this cover soon.

Atmospheric Disturbances

by Rivka Galchen / Picador

A man's wife disappears. In her place a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her. A simulacrum. He loves her but he won't be fooled. He knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that his real wife is alive and in hiding, he embarks on a idealistic journey to reclaim her. With the help of a man who believes himself to be a secret agent and is able to control the weather. He discovers that this man has developed a meteorological technique to verify that this woman is an impostor by using Doppler Radar technology. To prove once and for all that she's the "Dopplerganger" that he believes she is.

My original concept was to create a portrait of the woman out of Doppler Radar images. But it wasn't resonating with anyone. It was told that it was important to put across the idea of a duplicated person on the cover and to not make it too colorful. Back to the keyboard with the mechanical late for the printers.
The final design was born out of restrictions and deadlines. The character in the book is described as having blonde hair with bangs. Most of the woman images I found in stock were too posed. I photographed some of my co-workers faces. But the author liked the eyes on my original image. But everything else about her was incorrect. Her hair was the wrong color. So the only portion of her entire face that I could really use was just her eye. The author also liked this Doppler effect. WIth no time to see if I could retouch her dark hair into a blond, I instead cropped tight into the eye, placed it in the center of the circular rings (And NO, it wasn't die-cut. Limited budget. But I don't think it needed it). It was interesting but I still needed to convey the twin aspect so I duplicated it, flopped it, colored it and overlaid it to create tension between the two. So out of desperation with limitations and time came this solution.
I liked that I was able to keep it clean and work with basically two simple objects.

P.S. This is my very first design created and printed entirely from an Adobe InDesign mechanical. It's amazing. It looks exactly like Quark.

Doppler Effect:


Other Concepts:

The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture

by Tilman Allert // Picador

Sometimes the smallest detail reveals the most about a culture. In The Hitler Salute, sociologist Tilman Allert uses the Nazi transformation of a simple human interaction--the greeting--to show how a shared gesture can usher in the conformity of an entire society. Made compulsory in 1933, the Hitler salute developed into a daily reflex in a matter of months, and became the norm in schools, at work, among friends, and even at home. Adults denounced neighbors who refused to raise their arms, and children were given tiny Hitler dolls with movable right arms so they could practice the salute. And, of course, each use the greeting invested Hitler and his regime with a divine aura.

The first examination of a phenomenon whose significance has long been underestimated, The Hitler Salute offers new insight into how the Third Reich's rituals of consent paved the way for the wholesale erosion of social morality.

I wanted to avoid obvious Nazi imagery on the cover. I was able to find this crowd of smiling grandpas, babies, and citizens that almost looks like they're waving. The type treatment suggest the Nazi armband with the type following the tilt of the swastika.

The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse

by Richard Thompson Ford // Picador

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

What do hurricane Katrina victims, millionaire rappers buying vintage champagne, and Ivy League professors waiting for taxis have in common? All have claimed to be victims of racism. But these days almost no one openly defends bigoted motives, so either a lot of people are lying about their true beliefs, or a lot of people are jumping to unwarranted conclusions--or just playing the race card. Daring, entertaining, and incisive, The Race Card brings sophisticated legal analysis, eye-popping anecdotes, and plain old common sense to this heated topic.

Not the GREATEST idea in the world but I liked the simplicity of this design. I desaturated the image to make it monochromatic and relate a little bit more to the subject.
An interesting thing I learned while designing this came about when I was determining the representational sizes of the cards on the cover. If I reduced the cards slightly smaller that actual size, it somehow looked wrong. I realized that if you have an object on the cover that's near to actual size and it's not, you spend too much time wondering why it looks off. So if it's near, make it actual or make it much bigger.

The Housekeeper and the Professor

by Yoko Ogawa // A Picador Paperback Original

A beautiful story of a brilliant math professor, with a peculiar problem--since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper with a ten-year-old son who is hired to care for him. And between them a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms. Though the professor can hold new memories for only eighty minutes, his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past; and through him, the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the housekeeper and her son. The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.

The professors sees and speaks of the world around him in terms of math. I thought of a cherry blossom tree scattering its many petals in the wind. How the professor would see that pattern as a complex math equation and how the housekeeper could connect and begin to see the world in his terms. Along the edges where the pink background meets the photo, I printed the ∏ / Pi equation taken out to 200 decimal places to echo the meeting of the analytical and the emotional.
Nature, meet Math. Math, this is Nature.

Click to hear the ∏ / Pi song.



I forgot that this book was slated to come out a couple of years ago but under the title The Gift of Numbers. It was delayed because we were not happy with the English translation of the Japanese manuscript. I guess I shouldn't have used Babelfish. Here's the comp that only made it to Advance Uncorrected Proofs:

Photograph by Laura Hanifin

This is the second book I've designed for Yoko Ogawa. Her previous title was The Diving Pool. I remember picking this particular cherry blossom image with the dominant blue sky because I thought it would be nice to tie in with the overall blue of the pool. I think I'll have to find a way to use blue on her next novel.

Judging the AAUP

Way back in January 22, 2009, Deb Wood and I had the honor of judging the AAUP / The Association of American University Presses Book, Jacket, & Journal Show, 2009. The results are in! Congratulations to all who entered.

One of my favorite blogs, Faceout Books was kind enough to ask us for the INSIDE SCOOP behind the judging process. Enjoy the ramblings of a mad man.

From the AAUP Judges
FaceOut Books
Feb 9, 8:11 AM
I talked with Henry Sene Yee and Deb Wood to see if we could get the inside scoop on the judging process for the AAUP. They were kind enough to share with us some of what went on.
–Jason Gabbert

From Henry:
Designer Scott Levine at Cornell University Press recommended me to be one of two judges at this year's AAUP design competition. They were kind enough to offer to pay for my expenses to get to the place of judging. Sounds great. A little traveling would be nice. It turns out that their headquarters are here in NYC. Just down the block from the Flatiron where I work. I should've at least taken a cab half a block to my deli.

Scheduled to meet at 9 AM. We were set up in the quiet AAUP's office. One room had tables piled with books waiting to be judged for their interiors. There were so many interesting titles that I wanted to read. We asked what becomes of them after the judging and were told that they get donated to libraries and senior citizen homes. The jackets and covers were set up in the mail / supply room next door, spread out on the table. Deb Wood, the Design Director of Princeton Architectural Press was the other co-judge for the covers. I've never met Deb Wood although I've always admired her work at Princeton Architectural Press (PAP), no association with Princeton University Press (PUP). Ironically, we had both judged the NY Book show a month before but she was at the next table judging a different category. We had our coffee and we started going through the piles. Roughly separating them into NAYs and MAYBEs. There were surprising amounts of thoughtful and challenging solutions. A few designers names kept popping up with consistently good designs. We were pretty much in agreement on what we thought was a design that worked well. I was looking for good typography, clean information hierarchy, a fresh approach to the subject genres, interesting image choices. A photographer took pictures of us as we were deliberating. We tried to look thoughtful yet not Muppet-like in our expressions. We had a rough cut of about 45 chosen entries and needed to break it down to 35. But it was lunch time and we needed a break ourselves. We all went down the block to Monster Sushi. The restaurant is decorated with Godzilla memorabilia. They make a deliciously juicy yellow tail special roll. When they first opened, they were known as Godzilla Restaurant until TOHO, the copyright holders sued them for intellectual property infringement. You can read more here.

Back at the judging circle we continued our edits. With a more critical eye, we took some out. Reevaluated. Replaced jackets. One or two became less of a YAY after several viewing while others in the MAYBEs that insistently made it's presence known were added to the YAYs. Exhausting.
We then were asked to write our judge's comments. After the first one, we knew we were going to run out of adjectives and perhaps fall into the trap of saying the same boring comments. Nice blah, blah blah. Good use of blah, blah, blah. Who's really going to read this? So Deb and I decided to be a little bit loose and personal with our observations. Praising the use of hang quotes, colors, interaction between type and image. Throwing in puns and alliterations. That was fun and helped bring our energy level back up. In between pauses, we were checking our work emails on our iPhones. Getting coffee and updating my Facebook page. I tried convincing Deb to join Facebook. We were done by 4:00. Complete. Finito. Whew. But the interior judging was still hacking away. The piles were still high. They were going to have to come back tomorrow to continue. The AAUP wanted us all to meet up afterwards for drinks at the Algonquin hotel but I was beat. I was anxious to get back to work and finish up some projects for that day. Later on I had dinner and drinks and when I got home, I saw a Facebook friend request from Deb Wood. Hello new friend.

From Deb:
I really enjoyed judging the AAUP, it was refreshing to see the caliber of design coming from university presses. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Henry and I had to make some tough choices, as there were an overwhelming number of qualifying entries. (As you can probably see from the list!)

I often feel strange about judging a book cover without knowing the whole back story. As someone who's daily life consists of solving issues related to book design, I'm well aware that there is much more than meets the eye when we see an unresolved design or a missed opportunity. There are so many voices and challenges that the designer faces when designing a book cover. Sometimes what appears as a lukewarm cover, could actually be a triumph over many adversaries.

Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq

by Charles Duelfer

Art Director: Pete Garceau // PublicAffairs

Charles Duelfer is one of the most senior intelligence officers with on the ground experience to have worked in Iraq, before, during and after the Gulf War. He was asked by President Bush to investigate and report on why there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and his report was the first to provide official confirmation of the absence of WMD and an account for why so many people had believed they existed. (To see how the report was received – it was front page news – see Dana Priest’s Washington Post verdict) Duelfer was also entrusted with supervising the interrogation of Saddam Hussein after his capture. He has been at the heart of US intelligence’s dealing with Iraq since 1993, and he reported personally to George Tenet.

This book is nothing less that the search for truth amid the many deceptions in Iraq, the story of how Iraq was assessed as a threat, how Saddam responded fatefully to US demands, and how the decisions to topple the Saddam regime were implemented. No one is better able to see inside the mindsets of two administrations – the US and Iraqi – with their mismatched priorities, wounded pride and dangerous ability to bluff and counterbluff.

We searched high and low for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and never found them. To depict a bomb or anything concrete on the cover that suggested what they were looking for would contradict the book. I thought a good approach was to make it all type and have the title created by the idea of what they were looking for. Obsessively blinded by their search, WMD is always right in front of their eyes and they see it when it doesn't exist. I gave it a stenciled / spray paint look to suggest the military.

Other variations:


This one looked a little too, Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand, Six Hundred WMD-ish.

The Ego Tunnel

by Thomas Metzinger

Art Director: Nicole Caputo // Basic Books

What a difficult book for me to grasp. I think what this book is saying is that our consciousness does not exist in the outside world or the inner ego but in the space, membrane or "tunnel" in between. Or something like that.
Nicole suggested a beautiful, abstract pattern that symbolized this transition between these two worlds. After much trial and error, I thought of the childhood toy Spirograph. I went to Toys 'R Us and bought a new set. It all fancy and comes in an over designed template holder. It's horribly made. After a few bumpy revolutions, the wheel and pen would slip and skip and mars all your hard worked fun. Don't buy it.


Sketches:

Bodies

by Susie Orbach
BIG IDEAS // small books A Picador Paperback Original

Photograph by Jon Shireman

Throughout the Western world, people have come to believe that general dissatisfaction can be relieved by some change in their bodies. Here Susie Orbach explains the origins of this condition, and examines its implications for all of us.

Instead of using our bodies to change and remake the outside world, we spend our energy and time changing and remaking our bodies in the search for something else.

In my brain storming phone discussions with the photographer Jon Shireman, we were trying to define what this book was about. After several fruitless conversations, the word "Erase" came up. I immediately saw a body getting erase. Maybe a photograph of a person. But we decided a pencil drawing of a form would work best in the Big Ideas series look. I was more interested in the action. To also bring across the concept that we reform ourselves, using a drawing allowed us to use the leftover eraser bits to reform it back into the new body's shape.



This is an alternate image that I liked very much and wanted to use, right until the final mechanical stage. But in the end, I thought it suggested cloning or creating another body more than remaking yourself. I kept seeing Athena leaping out of Zeus' head fully grown:


Mary Cregan wrote a small piece about the cover in her Book Covers Blog, The Financial Times.



Susie Orbach on The Colbert Report:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Susie Orbach
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Readerville's Blog of the Week

Before the proliferation of blogs dedicated to the appreciation of cover design today, readerville.com was the only site on the web where you could read any discussions focusing on the cover design instead of the content. The Most Coveted Covers features were a must read and the follow up comments that began with admiration but quickly degraded to negativity was even more fun to read. Even though it sometimes annoyed the sh*t out of me.



So a big thanks to Karen Templer for highlighting my blog as the Readerville.com Blog of the Week.

The web is full of beautiful websites by book cover designers showcasing their work, but they are strictly that—portfolios of finished work. Henry Sene Yee (whose work, I should note, often appears in Most Coveted Covers) has taken a very different approach....

The Biggest Game in Town

by Al Alvarez // Picador

Illustration by Eddie Guy

Al Alvarez touched down in Las Vegas one hot day in 1981, a poker novice and a stranger to the excesses of the American game. Soon enough he was in the casino back rooms and musty bars of Las Vegas, meeting the flamboyant characters who dominate the World Series of Poker—roving gamblers who have won and lost many fortunes at the tables. Set over the course of one tournament, The Biggest Game in Town is both a chronicle of the World Series of Poker and a history of the hustlers, madmen, and masterminds who created the high-stakes game in America. With a new introduction by the author, Alvarez’s classic account is one of the greatest gaming stories ever told.

My original concept was to depict a city built on poker. I hired collage illustrator Eddie Guy to bring this idea alive. He collaged up the Las Vegas Strip out of playing cards and poker chips. But trying to depict the Strip was less than satisfying. We focused instead on the larger than life personalities of these poker mavericks. Thus, Giant Poker Guy.

Sketches:





Poker Hand Rankings (Because you got to know when hold 'em, know when to fold 'em):

The Other Side of the Island

by Allegra Goodman

Editor/Art Director: Jessica Rothenberg // Razorbill Books / Penguin
Jacket photograph by Andrea Chu
Model: Alexis Y // Generation

In the eighteenth glorious year of Enclosure, long after The Flood, a young girl named Honor moves with her parents to Island 365 in the Tranquil Sea. Life on the tropical island is peaceful—there is no sadness and no visible violence in this world. Earth Mother and her Corporation have created New Weather. Sky color is regulated and it almost never rains. Every family fits into its rightful, orderly, and predictable place...
Except Honor’s. Her family does not follow the rules. They ignore curfew, sing songs, and do not pray to Earth Mother. Honor doesn’t fit in with the other children at the Old Colony School. Then she meets Helix, a boy who slowly helps her uncover a terrible secret about the Island: Sooner or later, those who do not fit disappear, and they don’t ever come back.

This was my first assignment working with a YA (Young Adult) Publisher.

Having worked strictly for the adult trade market, I had to learn as I designed what was the appropriate look for the teen/tween market. My first attempts were either too sophisticated or too subtle for young reader. I had to learn a more direct language.

My first approach was to suggest the near future Utopian Island:
How about bullseye, because the character is an expert archer, overprinting in silver to represent a technology that blocks any signs of bad weather and the truth.


Nope? How about Adventure? (Honor is an excellent shot with a bow and arrow and uses her skills to save her parents):


Nope? Maybe I'll focus on the extreme atmospheric changes on the other side of the island
(In the future, They can control the weather so that it's always sunny):


That's close. Let's depict the girl running in a storm (She searches for her missing parents on the "Other Side" on the island where the weather isn't under the government's control) Usually in adult trade, I try to avoid depicting the main character so up front. But for the YA market, it's OK to visualize them. Sorta like how Harry Potter is visualized as a branded character:



Out of all of those, let's go with this one:


Love the concept but can I find another stock image where the girl is much younger, wears no make-up, has the right expression of fear and determination and is set against a much stormier sky.

Hmmm, trying to find all of this in a single stock photo is impossible. IMPOSSIBLE. It would be much easier to shoot this. Luckily they agreed and increased my budget.

Photographer Andrea Chu had sent me a promo earlier in the week and Kelly Blair also recommended her as a person she worked with. Her portfolio showed lots of experience with working with children so I hired her for the shoot. We found the lovely model Alexis Y through a modeling agency.

The photoshoot. Alexis was so professional, patient, conveyed the characters emotions perfectly and was just a breeze to work with.



An outtake shot:

Thanks to LeeAnn Falciani for manning the wind machine.

and the storm cloud background by ryan/beyer/getty images


Almost there:

But the type was too active. Go simpler and more legible please.

After a bunch of tweaks to the type, coloration of the sky, and opening up the shadows on her neck and hair, VOILÀ! The FINAL DESIGN:




Here's a good tutorial on Masking Details No Bigger Than a Hair in Photoshop and a video tutorial: Masking Hair in Photoshop CS3

The Best Book Cover Designs of 2008?

According to Joseph's The Book Design Review blog site, these are his Favorite Book Covers of 2008. Two of mine are represented here.

Vote for your favorite. I did.

Cracks in the Foundation

by Erica Ferencik // Waking Dream Press

Illustration by Victor Juhasz



I occasionally get request directly from authors asking if I'm available to design their covers. Always flattering, but I usually say no because of my busy schedule. And unless they're at a Publishing House and their Art Director hires me directly, I don't want to be stepping on toes. One of the things I hate to hear from the editor is that the author has a friend who's a designer and has great ideas, can you work with them. Yikes. I had a job where the editor told me that the author's response was, "A good start, can the designer give us the layered files so that my sister can move the elements around?" Get Thee Away From Me!

But in this case, Erica was doing it all. A one-person self-publishing house. Which has its own set of challenges. That means, in addition to being the author, she's the Publisher, the Marketing dept, the Sales dept, the Production Manager, Managing Editor, Copy Writer, Copy Editor, Art Director, and assistant. Imagine trying to get something approved. I have no one to rally on my side. It was a long process but in the end very enjoyable. It's a fun read. Check it out. Good luck with your book Erica!

Juhasz's Sketches:

PRINT Regional Design Annual 2008

I was quoted in the NEW YORK CITY section of this year's PRINT REGIONAL DESIGN ANNUAL 2008: NEW YORK CITY. December 2008. On your newstand now

By Jeremy Lehrer

The design literacy of clients and the general public alike was a recurring concern this year for art director Philippe Apeloig and designer Ronny Quevedo, as it was for many New York designers. The duo challenged that literacy with their event calendars and posters for the French Institute/Alliance Française, a Manhattan-based organization that promotes French culture and programming. Apeloig and Quevedo used playful, colorful compositions of dots—a modern riff on pointillism— as a conceptual device. The layout’s unusual design and typography choices don’t just unite the campaign, Quevedo says: “We’re also educating the reader on how to read our materials.”
     Point Five Design founding partner Alissa Levin thinks design literacy has vastly improved in recent years, partly because viewers are constant consumers of an increasingly design-savvy internet. Could this mean web design has become a positive influence on print work? “I feel like it has opened up possibilities in print,” Levin says. “Perhaps it’s because not all the pressure is on the print pieces, so it actually makes more room to try different things.” In the past, clients often hired two different firms for print and web components; Levin finds that it has become much more common to hire the studio to create both, as the Columbia Journalism Review did for a redesign of its print edition and website. Point Five’s redesign of CJR, completed in 2007, gives the magazine a bold cover format and a minimal, typographically elegant overall design that emphasizes the publication’s role as a media watchdog. Also in media, the business-culture magazine Condé Nast Portfolio debuted in late April 2007. The cover of its first issue featured a stunning aerial view of a nighttime cityscape, and standout photography and sublime information graphics have remained a centerpiece of the magazine’s visual identity. Continuing the minimalist trend in editorial design, design director Robert Priest explains that he and his team were striving for simplicity. “We want to be a lively and energetic magazine in terms of what we present, but there’s a certain clean aesthetic that we’re going for.”
     Photography forms the aesthetic DNA of many magazines, among them Newsweek, whose showcase portfolios in 2007 included scenes of Darfur, portraits of the four seasons in Japan, and photographs that revisited 1968’s pivotal leaders. Newsweek director of photography Simon Barnett says that Paolo Pellegrin, who took the pictures of Darfur, “is the most accomplished photographer working today who is able to bridge the difficult line between journalism and art. … [He] is at the leading edge of the new, young photojournalism movement, which has its roots in Italy. The photography is lyrical and operatic, and it is an amazing way to see the world.”
     Even in a weakening economy, the New York design business was robust in 2007 and through the summer of 2008; studios and design businesses reported hiring numerous freelancers to complete a full docket of work. At book publisher Picador, creative director Henry Sene Yee reports that 2007 was “very creative, not just with me, but with colleagues,” and the same has been true in 2008.
     Still, Yee began to worry when he realized that electronic readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s eBook had become enjoyable to use—even to him. “I think it’s going to allow people to read even more, but I don’t know what my role as a cover designer will be in that e-book future,” he says. One technology that’s exciting him, however, is design: related (designrelated.com), a networking site known informally as “MySpace for designers.” Yee has commissioned covers from designers he found on the site, and he praises it as a way of finding artisans working for lesser-known presses outside New York. “They’re doing incredible work for these small presses—these high-end concepts and designs that are just beautiful,” he enthuses.
     Designing with sustainability in mind continues to be a focus for designers, and, more and more, for clients as well. Suggestions for recycled papers and sustainable printing presses were “always something that we would bring to the table, and often— whether it was cost or something [else]—it was a difficult sell,” says Levin. “Now, it seems like people are really on board and want to know how they can do it and what they can do.” Seth Labenz of Brooklyn-based studio Topos Graphics notes that not everything labeled green is as sustainable as it should be. “We’ve found or observed that solutions are sometimes motivated by the appearance of being green, as opposed to a true commitment to real change,” he says.
     Labenz, with Topos partner Roy Rub, creates consistently avant-garde design that’s certainly helping expand design’s vocabulary—and its audience’s general literacy, too. He’s optimistic about design’s future possibilities: “It used to be a technique of marketing,” he says, “whereas today, more and more, it is not only that but a vehicle for reflection, knowledge, history, criticism, vision, provocation—a lens for culture but also an embedded, utilitarian tool for discourse and change.” The duo’s work, and the work of their fellows throughout New York City, reflects that exhilarating new mandate.

Jeremy Lehrer, a contributing editor at PRINT, is a freelance writer who covers design, sustainability, and spirituality.
This article appears in the December 2008 issue of PRINT.

Advice to War Presidents

by Angelo Codevilla

Art Director: Nicole Caputo // Basic Books

From a distinguished conservative scholar, a primer on the principles of foreign policy and how the United States, having ignored these principles for nearly a century, can use them to resolve its current crisis.

The Art Director Nicole Caputo wanted me to try, "a small handbook that has a plain state dept look, like a type pamphlet to war presidents" feel. This idea has been overdone and I've probably done it a hundred of times myself. But I'm here to serve the Art Director and her editor and I'll do my best to give it a fresh take. I thought working with a simpler amount of elements would keep it from looking too cluttered. The texture was key. I had an old A.T.A. Advertising Standard Type Book from 1951 that was laying around my office that I was actually going to throw away. It had a great pebbly textured case with gold foil type stamped into it. That would be a nice thing to play with.


The book itself is filled with pretty standard fonts, hence the name. So I thought this would be a no brainer in cleaning out my office. But because of this assignment, it just reinforces the idea that you can never throw anything out because you never know when you'll need to use it.

Another idea was to work with the Presidential Seal.

I heard somewhere that in times of peace, the Seal of the President of the United States depicts the bald eagle facing its usual direction towards its talons clutching the olive branch of peace. But in times of war, it is switched out with the eagle facing its talons clutching arrows of war. I like the idea that the state of conduct of the Union extends to even the smallest of details. But I read that it's just urban legend.

Alternate concept focusing on the Talons of WAR:


The US Government didn't allow us permission to use the original Seal so I had to recreate one for the final. I chose to combine an alternate idea that focused on the Eagle's Talons of War.



I like the way this turned out. It suggest that maybe this was Presidents Woodrow Wilson's original handbook and that it has been passed down from President to President offering advice. And now it'll be in the hands of our 44th President, Barack Obama.

Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life

by Robin Wilson

Art Director: Chin-Yee Lai // W. W. Norton & Co.

While doing research for this book, I came across a medical condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome:

also known as micropsia and macropsia, is a brain condition affecting the way objects are perceived by the mind. For example, an afflicted person may look at a larger object, like a basketball, and perceive it as if it were the size of a mouse. The condition manifests itself in connection with various other conditions, such as epilepsy, anxiety, and migraines. The disease is named after Lewis Carroll's novel due to the size changes Alice experiences. Carroll documented cases of classic migraines, so scholars have speculated that he may have experienced symptoms of macropsia or micropsia.

Since the emphasis of this book was on Lewis Carroll's forgotten achievements in the world of mathematics, I thought it was a a good idea to refer to Alice in Wonderland on the cover, but drastically de-emphasize her scale to frame it in this book's context to numbers.


Jacket illustration: Alice and the Cheshire Cat, illustration from Alice in the Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Color Litho) by John Tenniel, Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library.

Alternate comps:


One of my favorite example of a typeset book interior from 1865.

Voices: A Reykjavík Thriller

by Arnaldur Indridason // Picador

Cover photograph by Laura Hanifin

Whatever It Takes

by Paul Tough

Photograph by Jeff Riedel for The New York Times
Art Director: Michaela Sullivan // Houghton Mifflin Company

The Art Director Michaela Sullivan gave me a selection of photographs to work with. Mostly images of young students in their classrooms engaged and learning. But this pied piper shot of Geoffrey Canada amongst the multitude of children filling up a Harlem street said it all. Showing us all what is at stake.

What would it take?

That was the question that Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children — not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in the lives — their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.

Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but also of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, this is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.

Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

Art Director: Anne Winslow // Algonquin Books

Photograph by Jon Shireman

A spiritual road-trip novel.
The idea was to show Buddha or spiritual in some way on the cover. I thought of sunny side up eggs, or an enlightening stream of morning sunlight through a window. But thought a subtler way was Buddha shaped salt & pepper shakers in a breakfast setting with a plates of sunny side up eggs. I thought that was too much information so I changed it to a road side diner setting to suggest eating on the road.
I did a web search and was surprised that there actually were salt & pepper shakers in the shape of Buddhas from Neiman Marcus. But unfortunately they were not available. So the photographer Jon Shireman went down to the Pearl River Mart in Chinatown and found some wooden miniature Buddhas. We faked it by painting them glossy black and white to suggest ying and yang and drilling holes into it's head.

Salt & Pepper Shakers from Neiman Marcus / Not at a store near you.

The Paris Review Interviews: vol. 3

Introduction by Margaret Atwood // Edited by Philip Gourevitch
The Paris Review / Picador

• A PRINT's Regional Design Annual Selection

So I held out as long as I could from using red. I wanted to change it up and tried different background color versions. One using a purple so deep that it almost looks like black and one with a bright magenta. But good old fire engine red was what they wanted. I did try jazzing it up a little by using metallic silver and a greenish yellow and spot gloss on the large quotation marks.

Rotten

by John Lydon // Picador


by Jamie Reid. God Save the Queen (Single cover),1977. Newsprint, photocopy and paper.

I didn't realize that the band logo used on "Never Mind the Bollocks" was a photostat copy of the cut and paste type used on God Save the Queen. I still don't know what fonts were used in the original.


While doing research, I found this great article uncovering the background story behind the rock band logos.
The Top 10 Rock Band Logos by Koldo Barroso

coltrane

by Ben Ratliff // Picador

Cover photograph by © Rolf Ambor / ctsimages.com

Other Concepts:

The idea here was to depict John Coltrane as a sound wave. I thought these images were well-known enough to weather the abstraction. But for the final, we went with a stunning portrait that put the focus on his hand on the saxophone keys.

On the back cover, I printed Coltrane's Selmer Mark VI saxophone bell pattern as a subtle black on black background pattern:


Here's a collection of Blue Note: Over 1000 great jazz album covers.

Here's an awesome video of Miles Davis and John Coltrane performing
"So What" Live-New York, April 2, 1959:

I love observing the other musicians. When they're not busy performing, they're busy smoking.

Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative

by Paul John Eakin

Art director: Scott Levine // Cornell University Press

Hand-lettering by LeeAnn Falciani

The theme of the author is that (we create a sense of ourselves by the stories we tell) but with a new twist: he argues that narrative is not merely something we invent; it is an essential part of our sense of who we are. In fact, so close is the connection between narrative and identity that we should speak of “narrative identity”—a term he hopes will become part of the life writing lexicon.

I tried to convey these two co-exisiting states visually by using the idea of handwritten drafts/thoughts and typeset published finals overlaying each other. The simplicity of this solution reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye, from which I borrowed the color palette. Sorry J.D., But you didn't like these colors anyway.

My personal copy:

Forgotten Patriots

by Edwin G. Burrows

Art Director: Nicole Caputo // Basic Books

Jacket painting:
The Nation Makers, 1903 (oil on canvas) by Howard Pyle (1853-1911) © American Illustrators Gallery, NYC / The Bridgeman Art Library




Listen to this audio clip to learn more about Howard Pyle and the background story of the painting.

Alternate idea:

The Painted Word

by Tom Wolfe // Picador

Painting by Norman Rockwell

Cover painting: The Connoisseur by Norman Rockwell, printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency Inc. © 1962, Norman Rockwell Family Entities. Photograph courtesy of the Archives of the American Illustrators Gallery, NYC © 2008 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
www.americanillustration.org

How often do you get the chance to work with a classic Norman Rockwell painting on a book cover? And when you do, you absolutely can not crop, alter or print type over it. Which is fine by me. Nice.

Initial idea:

A Plea for Eros

by Siri Hustvedt // A Picador Paperback Original

Painting by Alan Baker

Here's a video of what became of the original painting:

One More Year

by Sana Krasikov

Art Director: Emily Mahon // Spiegel & Grau / Doubleday

Photography by Henry Sene Yee

The brilliant Emily Mahon was my former assistant and in this role reversal, for the first time EVER, she is Art Directing me. She did a great job.

A short story collection centering around the lives of immigrant families, many from Soviet Georgia. Emily thought it would be great to use one of my photographs on the cover to show the lives of these characters stuck in a rut. I decided to create still frames of my time-lapse movies. Showing the mundane but still beautiful, calming passage of time.



This time lapse clip was captured outside my window on a hazy, humid night on July 30, 2007.

Alternate Comps:

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

FINAL APPROVED DESIGN:

by Tom Wolfe // Picador

Hand-lettering & Illustration by Phil Pascuzzo. Based on a visual developed by Laura Hanifin

MY ORIGINAL IDEA:

Hand-lettering by Phil Pascuzzo

This book was about the rustic/Grateful Dead proto-Psychedelia movement and I didn't want to evoke the urban and developed Haight-Ashbury Psychedelia look or the Peter Max / Milton Glaser take on the '60s. This cover was inspired by the original 1965 Muir Beach Acid Test poster created by Norman Hartweg that was later hand-colored by Ken Kesey's daughter, Sunshine Kesey:



But this design was considered too hippie-dippie, crunchy-granola and a cleaner, more psychedelic redesign was requested.

My new idea was to focus on the Merry Prankster Bus, "Further," render it as a black and white pen and ink drawing ala The Beatles' REVOLVER album cover and project a psychedelic multi-color lava lamp effect over it.



Laura Hanifin's photographic interpretation of this was a toy bus painted white and dripping with colored paint.

Photograph by Laura Hanifin

Tom loved the idea but didn't want a photograph of a generic bus. He asked if we could instead, have an illustration of the actual Merry Prankster bus FURTHER and brighter. Ugh! This has to go to the printers yesterday.

So in a rare and unusual move, I took Laura's interpretation and put it back in Phil Pascuzzo's hand and he re-illustrated her approach using a photograph of the "FURTHUR" bus as reference which became the final cover.

Whew, approved. Just made the printer's deadline.
The final will be separated as 4/C process but with the cyan, magenta, and yellow inks replaced with their fluorescent equivalents for a brighter psychedelic look. Hopefully.

Big thanks to Laura and Phil-Dog for putting their egos aside, getting the job done and saving my ass.

TIME Interviews Tom Wolfe

Violence: BIG IDEAS // small books

by Slavoj Žižek
BIG IDEAS // small books A Picador Paperback Original

Photograph by Jon Shireman

Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Slavoj Žižek, constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in our world.

Using history, philosophy, books, movies, Lacanian psychiatry, and jokes, Slavoj Žižek examines the ways we perceive and misperceive violence. Drawing from his completely unique cultural vision, Žižek brings new light to the Paris riots of 2005; he questions the permissiveness of violence in philanthropy; in daring terms, he reflects on the powerful image and determination of contemporary terrorists.



From TimeOut Chicago book review // Issue 183 : Aug 28–Sep 3, 2008:

"Picador has more of these books lined up, and we hope they continue to be both as engaging and relevant as these two first salvos. And we hope they keep designer Henry Sene Yee churning out the tiny, beautiful packages." —Jonathan Messinger

Authors@Google Presents Slavoj Žižek // September 12, 2008


Slavoj Žižek - A debate with Steven Lukes // Barnes & Noble Union Square, NYC

Moral Relativism: BIG IDEAS // small books

by Steven Lukes
BIG IDEAS // small books A Picador Paperback Original

Photograph by Jon Shireman

Moral relativism attracts and repels. What is defensible in it and what is to be rejected? Do we as human beings have no shared standards by which we can understand one another? Can we abstain from judging one another's practices? Do we truly have divergent views about what constitutes good and evil, virtue and vice, harm and welfare, dignity and humiliation, or is there some underlying commonality that trumps it all?



Slavoj Žižek - A debate with Steven Lukes // Barnes & Noble Union Square, NYC

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

by Julie Phillips // Picador

James Tiptree, Jr., burst onto the science fiction scene in the late 1960s with a series of hard-edged, provocative stories. He redefined the genre with such classics as Houston, Houston, Do You Read? and The Women Men Don't See. For nearly ten years he wrote and carried on intimate correspondences with other writers—Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and Ursula K. Le Guin, though none of them knew his true identity. Then the cover was blown on his alter ego: "he" was actually a sixty-one-year-old woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon. A feminist, she took a male name as a joke—and found the voice to write her stories.

Jenny & the Jaws of Life

by Jincy Willett // Picador

Jincy Willett is the high priestess of dark comedy. The classic stories in this collection cut through every convention, every idea of normalcy, with empathy and fearless wit, undermining all the old ideas about the happy family, the good son, the dutiful mother. In Willett's world, perversity and tenderness walk hand in hand; there's laughter and funerals, ambivalence in the nursery, and redemption for the wicked. As David Sedaris writes in his foreword, "I'm prepared to wear a sandwich board for this book. I can't help myself. It' just too good."

Alternate approaches:

The Good Temp

by Vicki Smith and Esther B. Neuwirth

Art director: Scott Levine // Cornell University Press

HOW magazine article on Book Publishing

A couple of months ago, I had a fun and rambling phone conversation with writer Lisa Hazen that became part of this article which appears in this months HOW magazine 2008 International Design Annual-April 2008. On your newsstand now.

Design Disciplines Column, April 2008
By Lisa Baggerman Hazen
Reprinted with permission from HOW magazine, April 2008

BOOK DEAL
Book publishing is a billion-dollar business with intense competition from inside and outside the industry. And now more than ever, top publishers are turning to design and marketing to help set their books apart.

ONCE UPON A TIME, the book business was pretty straightforward. Books were sold in bookstores. They were found stacked neatly on shelves that beckoned with predictable cover treatments—title, author and leading image. Whether it was a novel or a cookbook, few titles strayed from this general structure. A book was a book was a book. The end.
     But book publishing isn’t what it was 10 years ago. It’s not even what it was last year. Interactive entertainment like videos, websites, games—even cell phones—compete with books for consumers’ leisure time more than ever. And books are no longer relegated to bookstores—you can find them everywhere from big-box stores to gas stations. One glance at a bookshelf reveals that there’s no longer a formulaic approach to book design, particularly when it comes to covers. In this marketplace, an inventive approach to book packaging and design can connect the buyer to a title before she reads a word.

THE DESIGN EDGE
Maybe they shouldn’t, but most people do judge a book by its cover. In fact, cover design is one of the most obvious and effective strategies publishers use to promote their titles. And the competition is fierce. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the number of new books published in the U.S. has more than doubled since 1996, with 172,000 new titles published in 2005. Factor in slowing book sales (a decrease of 4.3% between May 2006 and May 2007 according to the U.S. Census Bureau), and you can see that the market is saturated.
     “It’s the covers that really advertise the work,” says Henry Sene Yee, creative director of New York City-based trade paperback publisher Picador. “The cover design needs to stop you in your tracks, make you pick up the book and read the flap copy. The best way to do this is to create a package that is smart, professional and—most important—designed to connect with the target consumer emotionally.”
     When designing the paperback cover for Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” the story of a virginal college girl’s sexual awakening, Yee immediately faced some obstacles. The reviews weren’t as positive as hoped for, and hardcover sales reflected that. Although Wolfe was a well-established author, Picador wanted to market this particular title to a generation of college-aged readers who may not have been as familiar with Wolfe’s previous work.
     “Some people saw the story as more of a young girl’s downward spiral into sexuality,” Yee says. “But I didn’t see it that way—I saw Charlotte as blossoming. I started playing with format and die-cuts as a way to represent this vision.”
     To do this, Yee designed a two-tier system for the cover. The top flap is dark, with forms and twigs establishing the background, a white silhouette of the heroine and a die-cut in the shape of her dress peeking through to a chartreuse pattern on the page behind. When the top flap is opened, the title is revealed, along with flower blossoms and lighter colors. “This design was meant to reveal the true nature of the book—that she was blossoming,” Yee says. “It was fun to do something that was conceptual, but in a smart way.”
     But successful design doesn’t start and end with a book’s cover. Considering a book’s entire package is key to a successful publishing strategy.
     “We believe a good design is as important as good text, so we’ve always pushed to make the graphic design of our books work as hard as it can,” says David Borgenicht, president and publisher of Quirk Books, a Philadelphia-based publisher. The company describes its products as “impractical reference and irreverent nonfiction” books. For evidence of this, consider Quirk’s take on the traditional parenting book, “The Baby Owner’s Manual.” The authors provide practical and useful parenting advice. Yet, it’s written in a tongue-in-cheek manner, with an editorial approach that treats the baby as if it were a VCR. This tone is followed through with hip, iconic illustrations inspired by technical user manuals.
     “We wouldn’t have sold 350,000 copies of this book if it wasn’t graphically amazing,” Borgenicht says. “It would be just another parenting book. Instead, it’s a parenting book that’s sold in the Tate Modern gallery in London.”

ALTERNATIVE ENTERTAINMENT
It’s naïve to think that it’s just the youth market that’s turning to video games, the web and movies for entertainment. According to a study by the Associated Press-Ipsos, one in four Americans didn’t even read a book in the previous year. Yet 34% of adult internet users play online games, according to Parks Associates Research and Analysis.
     With an ever-precious window of free time for leisure, book publishers are looking for ways to make books relevant in a market that’s, frankly, less friendly to books. “We have the attitude of an entertainment company, not a book publisher,” Borgenicht says. “We realize that we’re competing not just with book publishers, but video games, the internet, DVDs, iPods and cell phones, so our books have to be as exciting as those things. Plus, we make our books as interactive as books can be. We have pop-up books, books with removable clues and more.”
     Look no further than “Graceland: An Interactive Pop-Up Tour” for proof. “This is a book you want, even if you’re not an Elvis fan,” Borgenicht says. “We wanted this to be a pop-up book that had a reason for popping up. We went all-out with the design and paper engineering. I think it appropriately represents the kitsch and coolness of Elvis.”
     Some publishers have found ways to incorporate different media into the books themselves. “We’re increasingly integrating DVDs and CDs into many of the books we publish,” says Patti Quill, senior marketing and publicity manager of art, architecture and design for San Francisco-based Chronicle Books. “We recently published ‘The Designer’s Toolkit,’ a book that includes not only strategies for grid design, but a companion CD with 500 ready-to-use templates.”
     And in “Lennon Legend,” Chronicle Books reinvented the traditional celebrity biography by creating an interactive package. In addition to the book, there are archival photographs and reproductions of Lennon’s handwritten lyrics, drawings, an audio CD and more. These types of elements serve to broaden the book’s appeal.
     But it isn’t just the quirky books that lend themselves to format innovation. Published by the Harper Collins imprint William Morrow, “Kockroach” is a literary novel that literally takes Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and turns it on its head—author Tyler Knox’s protagonist is a cockroach who awakens to find that he’s become a man. Will Staehle, a Los Angeles-based designer with more than 100 covers under his belt, was tasked with designing the book.
     In addition to a noir-ish treatment for the cover, with a cartoonishly out-of-scale men’s shoe about to flatten the book’s title on a city street, Staehle incorporated an interesting design element that went beyond the cover. “When you flip the pages, you see a reverse animation of Kafka’s metamorphosis,” Staehle says. “It’s little stuff like that that can set the book apart and keep it true to the story.”

BEYOND THE BOOKSTORE
The Book Industry Study Group reports that there are 15,000 stores in the U.S. that carry books, but only 8,000 of these are traditional “bookstores.” This also impacts the way the books are designed.
     When Oprah Winfrey chose Jeffrey Eugenides’ book “Middlesex” for her book club, publisher Picador was thrilled. But this unusual book about a first-generation Greek hermaphrodite needed to be packaged in a way that would convey its story in an appealing way to an enormous nationwide audience.
     “Despite the fact that this was going to be a book with a wide commercial audience, I pushed for the cover to be a series of grays rather than color and metallic,” Yee says. “I wanted to show restraint as a way to represent the different gray areas between gender, culture and generations that the book represents. I used interconnecting smoke and clouds to tie together illustrations on the cover that represented different aspects of the book. Everything just started clicking.”
     The approach paid off with an elegant cover treatment that worked on a variety of levels, including an attractive mass market package that was still true to the book. “I like to strip things down to their essence,” Yee says. “You have these books that are so complicated. Different themes, tones, plot points, etc. It’s necessary to take all this information but not make a kitchen-sink design. I wanted to create something with complexity that identifies this book among a sea of books.”
     But just because there’s increasing concentration on sales outside conventional book venues doesn’t mean that publishers are neglecting the traditional booksellers. Keeping close relationships with bookstores is as important as ever. “Chronicle still maintains a strong relationship with all the traditional avenues,” Quill says. “We do direct outreach to schools, direct marketing, one-on-one meetings. We’re not losing any of the
tools in the toolbox. We’re taking advantage of any and all possibilities.”

BINDING IT ALL TOGETHER
Editorial, marketing and design need an integrated approach to promote books effectively. But, in many ways, it’s how design is leveraged that helps complete the package.
     “Design is central to Chronicle’s strategy,” says publishing design director Sara Schneider. “That’s not to minimize anything else, but it’s never an afterthought. During the concept phase, we constantly ask, ‘How will we make this book distinctive, spirited?’ A unique look and feel is essential to this.”
     HOW has its own line of design books that caters to creative people of all stripes. But it’s HOW’s brand structure that keeps the books’ promotion in motion. “Our core graphic design titles, like Jim Krause’s Index books, are promoted in the magazine, on our website, in our e-mail newsletters and on our blog,” says Megan Patrick, senior editor for HOW magazine and books. “For HOW’s other books, the bulk of our marketing efforts are focused on behind-the-scenes tactics like getting our books on display at major retailers and doing big promotions at book-industry events like Book Expo America.”
     But just because the market is changing doesn’t mean that books are being displaced. “We know there’s still an audience out there for books,” Schneider says. “But we’re looking at what inspires and delights people about books, and capitalizing on that. We’re not abandoning the book as a form, but capitalizing on what is most appealing about it and taking it even further.”

Lisa Hazen has more than 14 years of experience in publishing, ranging from being a former HOW editor to a book author to working as the web director at Chronicle Books for more than eight years. She now owns her own Chicago-based writing and web design firm.

Kavalier & Clay Sketches

Cleaning up my office, I found these early ideas I had for Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay on a 1.44 MB Floppy Disk.


Sketch by Philip Pascuzzo





The Empire State Building is bound and shackled like Harry Houdini. A keyhole knocked out of a postcard I found at the 6th Avenue Flea Market. Both References to the book's "comic book" hero, The Escapist, created by the book's protagonists Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, a pair of Jewish comic book creators in the 1930s.

Crash Test

I found these early ideas I had for J.G. Ballard's CRASH on a bunch of SyQuest 44 MB cartridges.


Sketches by Stanley Martucci of Griesbach / Martucci

The first one was to depict crash test dummies in Kama Sutra poses. I wanted to illustrate a chart of multiple positions but Sales thought that this would never fly in Wal-Mart so I never got beyond this sketch stage. Hmm, when was the last time you saw J.G. Ballard's sold in Wal-Mart?


A sketch I did while waiting to get an idea.

J. G Ballard dies age 78 // April 18, 2009.

Volk's Game

by Brent Ghelfi // Picador

Top photograph by Henry Sene Yee
Model in white wig: LeeAnn Falciani
Gun courtesy of Steve Snider
Moscow photograph by Kevin Kelley / GettyImages

In a thriller set in Modern Russia, Alexei Volkovoy—known to the underworld as Volk, is a feared gun-for-hire. But who they really fear is his partner-in-crime and lover. A wild-eyed, white-haired young female assassin. I thought that she would be an interesting character to focus on. The fun part was having my designer LeeAnn pose for a quick shoot with a platinum wig and a plastic toy gun that Steve had laying around from another photo shoot. I had to Photoshop out the orange capped tip and replace it with a real muzzle. Overall I went for a lighter "Bourne Identity" movie poster feel.

A mention of the "photo shoot" was linked on The Book Design Review Blog. Thanks Joe.

HOW Magazine Top 10

My Design Blog was just chosen as one of HOW magazine Top 10 Sites for Designers.
Thanks everyone for visiting.

HOW Magazine Blog

My photographs got a mention on the HOW Magazine Blog. Nice.

Worldwide Pants Showcase: The World Is Flat

Thomas Friedman was just on Late Show with David Letterman and David held up my book cover. Nice.

The Resurrectionist

by Jack O'Connell

Art Director: Anne Winslow // Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill




Other concepts:



Hand-lettering isolated:

Fixing Failed States

by Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart // Oxford University Press

Ashraf Ghani, who played a central role in the design and implementation of the post-Taliban settlement in Afghanistan, has been nominated for the job of Secretary General of the United Nations and considered for the job of President of the World Bank. 'In Fixing Failed States,' Ghani, along with co-author Clare Lockhart (Director of the Institute for State Effectiveness), argues in that only an integrated state-building approach can heal these failing countries.

This job request came to me from an unlikely source. I was hired by the author's agent. I was sensitive to the fact that it can be tricky and awkward when the publishing house's art department is forced to work with an outside designer. Working on this cover was the very definition too many cooks. I worked directly with both authors and a representative at Oxford who I thought was the Art Director but later found out was the Marketing Director. Despite the tight deadlines, and the logistics of who's seen what version and will I be setting the back ad and flaps and who get what when, it went fairly smoothly and on time. But damn, I didn't have enough time to revise the art so that the globe wasn't kissing the "I". But overall, I liked how this turned out very much.

Below is a detail of the revised Fractured Globe "X":


Concepts leading up to final: