The Uni Press round-up is back! We welcome you to our ongoing feature, now penned by designer and photographer Giles Hoover, in which we periodically highlight a selection of recent university press cover designs, with commentary. Please enjoy this celebration of amazing work.
This list is in alphabetical order by press. Where possible, credits are listed in the captions.
From book covers in the late 1800s with simple text and bindings to today's vibrant looks, book design is part of a story's spirit. The way your book appears has an impact on how readers receive it. A cover design can tell people what to expect and grab their attention, encouraging them to pull it off a bookshelf or digital product page.
‘Sprawling cities. Lawless rural landscapes. A long and unforgiving history. Here is where the winds blow cold and the nights are long.’
The publishers Dead Ink have earned a reputation for commissioning some fantastic covers, so I was pleased to get the opportunity to add to their catalogue with the cover for their Northern crime anthology Motives Unknown. Anthologies are some of my favourite books, particularly for a train or bus journey, devouring a story between stops. The brief for this collection was clear: the cover should evoke a sense of crime and the North.
The 12th Annual Academy of British Cover Design awards took place last night (Thursday 6th March); although they very nearly didn’t. A dodgy cable had event organiser Jon Gray sprinting off into the night like a bearded Batman to find a replacement. Luckily he did and the show could go on!
Emcee extraordinaire Jack Smyth was back in his rightful place, announcing the categories and urging us all to keep the noise down. Turns out that 100ish inebriated designers in one room can cause quite the ruckus.
Photography as part of book cover design is a relatively recent addition to book cover designers’ and marketers’ toolboxes. It was not until the late 20th century—as camera equipment became more accessible—that photographic book covers began to gain popularity for their ability to convey realism, emotion and immediacy to the audience.
In today’s attention economy, authors and publishers are competing not only with each other, but also with the many distractions of life 一 from streaming platforms to social feeds. Book covers have long played a vital role in driving sales by appealing to the book’s target audience. Yet now more than ever, they’re an author and publisher’s best chance to compel people to stop what they’re doing and find out more about their book. The question is how to create a cover that will achieve this.
The original title for Dorothy Parker in Hollywood was Out There.
Out There came to me a full 12 months ago through John Vairo, a real gem of a guy and an Associate Art Director at Gallery Books (S&S). With a title like ‘Out There’ for a book about the incredible Dorothy Parker, the original vision for this jacket was colorful and a bit wild. John envisioned a classic portrait of Dorothy that was enhanced with “Jean Cocteau-inspired drawings.” When I looked up Jean Cocteau, I immediately thought of the branding for British DJs Disclosure. Rad.
I was thrilled. The publishing house where I work was going to reissue my favourite author. I immediately started brainstorming cover ideas, even before the new edition was officially announced. This was in 2021, and I spent the entire year working on these covers. I had never invested so much effort into a project, and I believe it is my best work yet. But, unfortunately, the covers never saw the light of day.
On August 13th 2024 Dzanc Books will publish Lindsey Drager’s fourth experimental novel, The Avian Hourglass. Here is a description of the book, taken from the publisher’s website:
At once an ode to birds, an elegy to space, and a journey into the most haunted and uncanny corners of the human mind, The Avian Hourglass showcases Lindsey Drager’s signature brilliance in a stunning, surrealist novel for fans of Jesse Ball, Helen Oyeyemi, Yoko Ogawa, and Shirley Jackson
Last night (Thursday 7th March) saw the convergence of Britain’s best and brightest book cover designers at Gigi’s in Hoxton for the 11th Annual Academy of British Cover Design awards.
It was the first time being held in the bar upstairs and I think we were all grateful for the increase in space and the improved ventilation :)
I have previous experience as a packaging designer, so when I get a series like this I tend to look at it as though I’m developing a product line. That is to say, instead of developing three covers for three separate stories, I develop an overarching visual look, and then tailor that look to each individual story. It’s almost like creating a visual language, and then using that language to express three distinct ideas.
This novel is centred around Daphne, a young and confused 20-something who has just moved to Berlin, seemingly in search of herself, but we never really know if we can trust her accounts of her life or what’s happening around her. Even her thoughts are rather distorted and almost dreamlike. It felt important to focus on Daphne and not the urban city itself, as with a title such as Berlin I didn’t want it to fall into the realms of non-fiction or indeed look too literal.
In Laura Adamczyk’s novel Island City, we meet a nameless wry and wistful woman who has basically given up. She sells all her belongings and moves back to her hometown which she claims it’s the “perfect place to give up.” She parks herself in a dark local bar and begins to tell her stories to the indifferent regulars around the bar. We only hear her voice, never any of the strangers, or bartender, only her point of view. It’s basically a booze-soaked monologue as stories and memories blur from one to the other with forgotten missing holes as she continues on to drink three, four, and so on.
MIT Press’s forthcoming book Voidopolis is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City. Written to reflect the author’s experience of COVID as the physical city emptied of people and activities, the book is printed with missing words and incomplete images. It is illegible in the printed form and readers must use an augmented reality app to read in full. However the app is designed to degrade over time — revealing less and less before renewing itself on an annual basis—an ingenious concept from author Kat Mustatea that physically reflects her rumination on loss and memory.
Bariloche is the story of a garbage collector from Buenos Aires obsessed with jigsaw puzzles and haunted by memories of first love. I was struck by the narrative’s dual focus of, on the one hand, actual deterioration (garbage) as it mirrors the protagonist’s spiritual depletion and physical exhaustion, and, on the other, the lyrical (represented in the rural scenes on the puzzles) as it parallels the protagonist’s idealized memories. I knew I wanted the cover to represent this polarity.
It seemed to me that the primary tomes on the history of paper were dressed in versions of royal purple. And that books on the art of paper craft and binding were often celebrating multiples—many handmade journals, many bindings.
Might we avoid purple? I wrote to my editor, as discussions about the book’s look got underway. Might we develop something singular and centering?
Everything That Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost is a poetry collection by deaf Indigenous author Sage Ravenwood, to be published this fall by Gallaudet University Press. For the cover the author wanted to incorporate images of ravens in some way. The brief stated “ravens represent the crossing of dead.” I could show elements, claws, feathers, anything that got the idea across. It was even suggested that I take a look at a bird that had passed on, which I found interesting.
The Adult is a gorgeously written, queer coming-of-age novel about innocence, identity, yearning, sex and poetry. It follows the story of college freshman Natalie—shy and solitary—who meets an older woman and is drawn into a relationship with her.
When I was designing the cover, I started with the title. On the surface, the word ‘adult’ has no moral or dramatic character, it is just a noun. But in the context of the novel, it is a complicated question. What is an adult? When we say that two people are ‘adults,’ are we implying that they are equal?
Before I began designing this cover, I met with author Jason Yamas to hear more about his story. Tweakerworld is a memoir documenting Jason’s plunge into the ParTy n’ ‘Play (PnP) subculture in the gay community and his subsequent rise as a meth lord in the Bay area. While this book is about heavy topics like addiction, abuse and shame, Jason covers them with humanity and humor. After another discussion with the team, I knew that this cover needed to be fun at first glance, but when you look further you notice something is “off.” There’s darkness in the Tweakerworld, but no one sees it right away. That’s how you get sucked in. Jason offered to take photos of himself so I could use his face on the cover if I wanted. While he shot them, I worked on some other options.
I’m a horror fan, so naturally I was excited when the cover brief for Lindsay Wong’s new book arrived in my inbox. I immediately asked Lindsay’s editor, Deborah Sun de la Cruz, for a copy of the manuscript. As I dug in, I paid close attention to the style and tone of the writing, attempting to draw out the visual personality of the story. If the book were an image, what would it look like? Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality is a collection of surreal and hilarious immigrant horror stories that mixes ancient myth with modern day social satire, explores themes of family, trauma, vanity and love, and is populated by a gruesome assortment of ghouls, ghosts and zombies. This was going to be interesting!
Wandering Souls follows the journey of three siblings as they flee their Vietnamese village at the end of the war and embark on a perilous boat journey to Hong Kong, which tragically, the rest of their family do not survive. They go on alone to navigate refugee camps and resettlement centres until arriving in Britain. As they strive to find a new sense of home and connection, the siblings’ narrative is interwoven with the voices of their lost brother Dao, and an unknown researcher who pulls together fragments of their story. This felt like a special novel from the outset, and an important story to tell. It was clear that the cover needed to look unique and captivating, but also convey the sense of loss and heartache at the centre of the story.
As a designer, the process of creating a book cover can be challenging, especially when it comes to translating the essence of the story into a visual representation. However, for Blue Hunger, the process was an exceptional one. In fact, the book was so visually compelling that ideas for the cover design started forming in my mind as I read through the manuscript.
