Vera Drmanovski on Redesigning the Novels of Hermann Hesse
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Vera Drmanovski is a multidisciplinary lettering artist, working across analogue and digital mediums. Here she takes us through her passion project of redesigning Hermann Hesse’s entire collection of novels.
Have you ever fallen in love with a writer early on in your life, and you keep re-falling in love every decade or so?
That is my relationship with Hermann Hesse. In my late teens, I discovered the world of Hermann Hesse and fell in love with his deeply philosophical way of thinking, written in a way I could relate to and understand even as a young soul. I keep coming back to his books every decade or so, experiencing them in a whole new way, as if they are growing up with me.
Today I am a lettering artist with a superpower to design book covers. I decided to use my skills and do a makeover of the old Hermann Hesse collection that I owned for more than 20 years. The collection consists of 9 books, some with multiple novels within, and it has seen better days.
Designing a book collection required a different approach than designing single book covers. I needed to look at Hesse’s work as a whole, not focusing on individual books; but finding this common thread in all his books that can tie the collection together. Hesse’s books are philosophical and existential, full of self-discovery, spiritual journeys and enlightenment. Since I am a lettering artist, I wanted the covers to be letter-centric, and I decided to use illuminated manuscripts as an inspiration, as a way to convey Hesse’s work. The direction needed to give me enough room to explore multiple design options to create nine book covers that fit together and complement each other.
The process started with me studying illuminated manuscripts and blackletter letterforms. I will be honest here; before this project, blackletter letterforms was one of the lettering styles that intimidated me the most. From the start, I understood that I was going to be stepping outside of my comfort zone. I will need a sufficient amount of time for this project; and, I will have lots of doubt in the process. So I prepared myself for a rocky journey.
Making a mood board and having lots of lettering references was very important. I studied the original illuminated manuscripts, but I needed to find a way to make the artwork modern. I also needed to be very careful with the legibility of the letterforms, as our modern eye is not trained to read this type of script.
By the time the sketching phase began, I had a solid understanding of blackletter letterforms, and now it was time to put it into practice. Like all my projects, I started with rough sketches. Since I was working on a collection, I worked on all books simultaneously. Once sketches were done, I moved on to refining the sketches and preparing them for digitization. I hung a corkboard over my desk to pin each step of the process for all books. That way I can look at the artwork together and make sure they work as a collection.
Now comes the best part, digitizing my sketches. I used Adobe Illustrator for this, as vector work gives me the power to fine-tune letterforms, add or subtract decorations, and play with colours. Once I had vectorized, polished and fine-tuned all the designs, it was time to decide what role the colours would play in the design. Given that Hesse was one of the most prominent writers of the 20th century, the design needed to have a modern look. One way to achieve that was by injecting bright colours. I needed to be very strategic with how I used colour and the number of colours per design so that the collection didn’t become, for the lack of a better word, kitsch. I limited myself to four colours per cover, plus a background colour.
Since this is a personal project and an homage to my favourite writer, I wanted the collection to have my stamp. And simply put, I love stripes. I have them in my home, I like stripes on my clothing, I use stripes in my work very often; so stripes were something that I wanted this collection to have. I decided to make alternate dark and light backgrounds for the books, so when placed together, spines will emulate stripes.
The final step was adding textures and patterns with Procreate (an app on iPad Pro). Procreate is great for this step because it allows me to create patterns and brushes. This extra step in my process added another dimension to the artwork, where digital work doesn’t look digital; it has depth and tangibility. That was the final step in my process before preparing and sending it to print. But something was missing to make this collection special, and that was a binding box, which the original collection didn’t have. That was a “cherry on top of the cake” to give this collection the exclusive look it deserves.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.