Eric C. Wilder on Creating a Triptych for Open Letter Books
Eric C. Wilder is a freelance designer living in Upstate New York. Here he takes us through his process for creating three covers for Open Letter Book’s Translator Triptych series.
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.
Playing around, I had come to fall in love with a typeface developed by David Jonathan Ross called “Fit.” It’s super chunky. I could push and pull and manipulate it in the image space in fun and interesting ways. I worked up three ideas using the titles, in one color. I like to keep things simple to start. It looked cool, but was it illegible? Did it pass the thumbnail test? (Does it need to pass a thumbnail test?) Could I still do this but maybe have it (finger quotes) more legible? Maybe.
I tried hitting the reader with the title crystal clear at the top of the page, with the blocky type as a design element underneath the titles. I wasn’t entirely happy with this, but I still felt like there was something there. Looking at each cover iteration was now too much of a two step process, and was somehow less rewarding.
Setting the title inside the block letters had sped everything up. But, now that it was hitting me faster visually, having the title on each book twice felt redundant.
So, I turned the blocky type into a play on rectangular shapes. I selected a more rounded typeface for the titles to set it off slightly from the blockier background. I added a texture to the blocks of color to soften the look a little. Then I added elements so that each cover reflected the manuscripts I’d been given to review. All-in-all, I took a little more time to work on than other covers because it was so fun to explore. It was a very rewarding experience! I look forward to seeing this series in print (from Open Letter Books, January 2024!)
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.