Josh Durham Creates a Beautifully Complex Cover for The Pillars
Josh Durham is a multi award-winning designer who worked in the magazine industry before setting up his company Design by Committee in sunny Australia. Here he talks us through his process for creating the intricate cover for The Pillars.
Don't worry about the housing bubble, she would say. Don't worry about the fact that you will never be able to afford a home. Worry about the day after. That's when they will all come, with their black shirts and bayonets, and then you will see the drowned bodies and slit necks. And I would stand there and say, But Mum, I'm ten years old.
A dark satire and second generation immigrant story set in outer suburban Sydney, during that city's insane housing boom. The Pillars follows the wild life of protagonist Panos, a struggling writer awash in a toxic world of aspiration, consumerism, methamphetamine and other moral gray areas. The writing is at times uncompromising and brutal – a withering portrayal of modern Australia.
This quote from Australian Book Review sums up the setting for this book:
“Pemulwuy, the suburb Panos lives in, is a place of aspiration, a community gated not by walls but by the force of will of its homeowners, to keep property values high. The houses are identical; the gardens are sparse; the roads have no potholes; neighbours rarely meet.”
I was lucky enough to attend a workshop with the legendary Jon Gray of Gray318 in Melbourne a few years back and one thing about his process that stuck with me was the notion of 'taking the temperature of the book' – I'm not saying that was the exact language Jon used but the idea that a book could be hot, cold, lukewarm, blazing, boiling, etc is something I always ponder after finishing a manuscript. This book was definitely a week-old-crab-bisque-soup with a shitload of chili thrown in. Pungent, intoxicating and also repellent in parts.
Location is central to this book and I had this clear image in my mind of some sort of suburban-nightmare suburb – no beginning or end, just endless pools and houses in an infinite loop. I wanted the viewer to feel unsettled looking at this cover. I started playing around with images of a Sydney suburb shot from above and cropped a section and then mirrored it horizontally, and then vertically. It suddenly looked as much like a Middle-Eastern tile as it did a nightmare Australia. The central area of the image formed a temple-like building that came to represent the mosque that Panos protests against in the book (and that also gets blown up on the back cover). I pumped up the intensity of the colours – made the yellows toxic and sickly. An image of this detail and complexity demanded typography that was bold and strong enough to read out against the busy-ness. The type was folded into the image with subtle overlaps to bring it all together.
Revisiting the rejected roughs is always interesting – there is too much humour in these. I can see that straight away. The publisher was pushing for actual pillars on the cover and I eventually relented, but it's like the book about apples with an apple on the cover instead of a worm, it's far less visually interesting or engaging and tells you a lot less about the scope of the book itself. Having said that, I did have a bit of fun playing with the scale on this one.
And the bins are a nice visual spin on the notion of 'pillars' (and terrorism).
It's funny looking back over my roughs – or lack thereof – and realising this was one of those covers I cracked at the first attempt. A rare thing! And that's not to say the publisher didn't send me back to do more, it's just that we kept coming back to this one. While writing this article I have found myself speculating on the clarity, intensity and creative energy that is sometimes there when you have finished reading a manuscript, especially one as relentless and kinetic as this. I have cut showers short and scoffed unbuttered toast to get back to my desk in haste when inspiration strikes. It is not always like this – I can read whole manuscripts and still be a bit foggy about where to head creatively – but as much as it is a cliché, the clues (and visual cues) do lie in the manuscript itself. Sometimes they take longer to become clear and sometimes they are fully formed. When being harassed for concepts or staring down a marketing deadline I do not recommend telling a publisher that your concepts are not 'fully formed' yet. That could be your Barton Fink moment.
Final cover
Full cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.