Exercise 10: Conceptual cover design

Look at the book covers shown and try to work backwards from the image to the thought processes of the art director or designer.  You'll need to familiarise yourself with the book's contents to be able to do this properly so research the storylines on the we.

The Honeymoon’s Over – Andrea Chapen and Sally Wofford-Girand

Amazon Book Description

Freelance editor Chapin and literary agent Wofford-Girand gather essays by 21 women writers who dish about their troubled marriages. The suicide of her violent ex-husband renders Debra Magpie Earling gun-shy of future romances, and Lee Montgomery contemplates infidelity on a flirtatious ski weekend with her former college boyfriend while her trusting husband of 20 years is off visiting his ill father. Elissa Minor Rust's commitment to her husband is unwavering despite her break from the Mormon Church that once was their union's bedrock; an unplanned pregnancy threatens Annie Echols's marriage; and Daniela Kuper battles a religious guru for child custody. Although candid and heartfelt, many of these essays are unpolished, rambling and poorly edited, like Zelda Lockhart's saga of coming into her own as a lesbian and a mother. Another low is Terry McMillan's vulgar rant about an ex-husband, who admitted to homosexual exploits on national television.

The two best pieces are self-knowing, gutsy and carefully crafted: Joyce Maynard confesses how her earlier infidelity nibbled away at a lonely marriage that abruptly ended when her husband slept with the babysitter while she was away caring for her dying mother; and Ann Hood proves that a loving marriage can miraculously survive a child's death.

Comment

I like this cover as it says to me that once the first happy, absorbing period in a ‘marriage’ has faded into a distant memory and affection for a partner goes you are left with someone who is not prepared to move the earth for you and what you get are things the other end of the spectrum like burnt toast.  

It would be fairly easy to obtain the props for this cover once the initial design was agreed with the art director and the main decision would probably be how much to burn the toast.

Missing Men: A Memoir – Joyce Johnson

Amazon Book Description

Joyce Johnson captures the hunger to replay life's moments -- painful and joyous both, over and over like a song, as she put it -- to feel what they have meant, to hear them right, to savor and take them inside you and somehow keep living them long after they're gone.  She shares the scary lack of fulfilling resolution when the little enlightenments don't simply add up to resolution and love. She doesn't hide her fear of dying alone, and that's something so few writers have the courage or ability to really share.

Comment

I find this cover gives the idea of a person alone.  Whilst the bed has been slept in (observed by the wrinkles in the sheet and indentation on the pillow) the fact that the bed is empty makes me feel that this side of the bed is often empty. i wonder if the colour of the bedding is significant to the whole design?  

It would fairly easy to obtain the props for this image as beds and bedding are fairly easy to obtain.  The lighting seems to come from the right hand side, indicating perhaps that there was a window on that side.

Nova – James Boice

Amazon Book Description

Grayson Donald, seventeen years old, has just hanged himself from a basketball hoop next to a playground in Centreville, North Virginia (NoVA). The question is Why? In this incisive dissection of the author's hometown, James Boice scratches its shiny suburban surface to reveal a place formed from "a cloud that slid west and met with the humidity and spent buckshot cartridges and Civil War bones clad in blue and grey to create concrete and vinyl siding and front yards laid in chunks, child care centres and video rental places."

James Boice blends sharp social observations with dark humour and remarkable prose. In both passing glimpses and intimate interior monologues, we come to know Grayson's family, his fellow students, his neighbors, and many who knew him only slightly, if at all. A portrait of a town emerges that renders Grayson's suicide both devastating and inevitable. NoVA is a unique and fascinating depiction of the American suburb.

Comment

I find this cover confusing, as it’s actually an inverted image (see Exercise 9 – Choosing Imagery).  I had to take a long look at it to see what was included in the design – that of a white picket fence with the sun shining behind it. Why the designer has chosen to invert the fence and place it at the top of the image is confusing. To me the ‘white picket fence’ epitomizes the image of white middle class Americans living in the suburbs of a town where all is serene and hunky dory.  Do we take it that all is not what it seems and life is a turmoil of contradictions?  I don’t get that from the cover at all.

I would imagine that the picture of the picket fence with the sun shining through it would be sourced from an image library (could be through Google) and a royalty paid. This would save a lot of hassle commissioning a photographer or artist to create a new image.  As this type of picture has often been used to depict the American suburbs I would imagine there would be many similar images available through well known image libraries.

A General Theory of Love – Thomas Lewis

Amazon Book Description

Drawing comparisons to the most eloquent science writing of our day, three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain. The result is an original, lucid, at times moving account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well being. 

A General Theory of Love draws on the latest scientific research to demonstrate that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Explaining how relationships function, how parents shape their child’s developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this is a work of rare passion and eloquence that will forever change the way you think about human intimacy.

Comment

This cover is very emotive to me.  Placing two chairs in the centre of an empty room, with a very bland background, signifies togetherness. Tilting one chair against the other gives a sense of reliance of one chair on the other and I feel it indicates the tilted chair needs the other to survive.  Togetherness is taken further by linking the two together.

If you were the commissioning art director you would need to find a suitable building with windows either side of a long hall.  The chairs would be fairly simple to source, any second hand shop would be able to provide an identical pair of chairs.

The Opposite House – Helen Oyeyemi

Amazon Book Description

Lyrical and intensely moving, The Opposite House explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women. Growing up in London, Maja, a singer, always struggled to negotiate her Afro-Cuban background with her physical home. Yemaya is a Santeria emissary who lives in a mysterious somewherehouse with two doors: one opening to London, the other to Lagos. She is troubled by the ease with which her fellow emissaries have disguised themselves behind the personas of saints and by her inability to recognize them. Interweaving these two tales. Helen Oyeyemi spins a dazzling tale about faith, identity, and self-discovery. 

Comment

I find this cover confusing as, reading the Book Description above you read that the whole story is about one house with two significant doorways giving access to two very different places on different continents.  Whilst a door is prominent on the bottom right hand corner there is nothing to show its real significance.  

Would it be difficult to reproduce? I think this picture is an artist's impression, therefore to produce it would be fairly simple, just commission someone who is good at drawing/painting people.

Presence – Arthur Miller

Amazon Book Description

This book is an unforgettable collection of a master storyteller’s final works. In Presence, a posthumous gathering of his last published stories; he reveals the same profound insight, humanism, and empathy that characterized his great dramatic works. The six stories included here have all appeared in major publications and each displays all the confidence of an artist in his autumnal prime. Presence is a gift that all fans of Miller’s work, as well as readers of contemporary fiction, will applaud.

Comment

The hazy grey cover supports the idea that the author of the book is no longer with us (a euphemism for someone who has died).  The ghostly person in the middle distance also supports this idea.  The whole cover is very simple with very little to distract your eye from the author’s name and the title of the book. It’s about as basic a book cover that you could get.

As to commissioning this cover, I would think if you didn't have an image of the author then you would need to either find a suitable picture of someone in an image library or commission a photographer to take some pictures of a man in the studio and create the whole image using Photoshop to merge the two together and add the text.