Designer Jo Walker has an impressive portfolio of book covers. Among her amazing works are jackets for the novels of Laline Paull, published by 4th Estate. Here, in her own words, Walker details the rationale behind the design for the most recent of these books, The Ice.
Jaya Miceli is an Art Director for Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. Among her designs includes the covers for Zoey Leigh Peterson's Next Year For Sure, Katie Kitamura's A Separation, and Charles Lambert's The Children's Home. Miceli was kind enough to answer a few questions for Spine.
Sit down for four hours every day. Drink coffee.
Erika Swyler's writing practice is summed up in two basic phrases, practical sentences nothing like the lovely prose she spun in her first novel The Book of Speculation and numerous short stories. Her debut bestseller follows two threads stitching together the story of 21st-century Long Island librarian Simon Watson with that of an 18th-century carnival troupe.
Jenna Stempel is a Senior Designer at HarperCollins Children's Books in NYC with work notably featured in the New York Times and the 2015 New York Book Show. Here she talks with Spine once more about her elaborate design process in creating the anniversary book covers for the Little House on The Prairie Trilogy box set - presumably no easy task!
“We always start off with the plan of writing alternative chapters, but [that] doesn’t always work out in practice. One of us might get stuck and take longer to work through a particular chapter, or she might want to keep going and complete the whole of that section. Also, the chapter outline might well change as we write: characters do things we hadn't anticipated, resulting in the story changing or needing to be told in a different order. The important thing is to get the first draft finished! Editing too early can be fatal - you just end up going over and over the same ground.”
Over the course of his 30-year career, designer and art director Chip Kidd has created many of the book world's most famous cover images — the white boxer shorts of David Sedaris's Naked, the stunning, ruffled mane of All the Pretty Horses, the Jurassic Park T-Rex skeleton — and possesses one of the most well-known names in book cover design. Despite his iconic status, the designer told Spine he's made a career of avoiding a signature style.
Depending on who you ask, Adalis Martinez is either the exception to a so-called rule or definitive proof that an art school education can pay off—more than pay off, really. The designer, a self-proclaimed “island girl” hailing from the Dominican Republic by way of the Bronx, graduated from SVA just three years ago and has already received accolades for her work from a little something called The New York Times.
Long before she created her award-winning children's book "The Fox and the Star," before the prizes and acclaim, before the career, even before the university degree in Typography and Graphic Communication, designer Coralie Bickford-Smith had an idea for a story about a little girl.
The creators of most of the franchise's art, Miraphora Mina and Eduardo Lima, met in 2001. Mina was already part of the film design scene in London, specializing in graphic and prop design, and worked on the original Potter film. Lima was new to the UK, having worked for several postgraduate years as a film editor in his native Brazil. Both were hired to design for "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," second in the Potter series, and have been collaborating ever since. Most recently they designed the covers for "Pottermore Presents," three eBooks offering readers more of J.K. Rowling's writing about Hogwarts and the wizards who teach there.
"For me, influence comes from a manuscript. The style of book will inspire what kind of approach I take for my designs (abstract, literal, figurative). I am also a typography geek so I am constantly inspired by cool and wacky letterforms."
"The concept for this cover was contained in the title itself, and also the strapline supplied with the brief: 'a) Fiction b) Non-fiction c) Poetry d) All of the above e) None of the above.' As I saw it, all I had to do was sort out the aesthetics."
Emma Rogers is a Graphic Designer specializing in book cover design and lettering. She is recipient of the prestigious D&AD Yellow Pencil Award for her cover designs in 2008. She also won an ABCD award in the Mass Market category for her design of The Scent of Death in 2014. Here she answers our questions about her work.
