ext to romance and fantasy, I can’t think of any genre other than science fiction that relies so heavily on base images. The possibilities with design are wide open for fiction and arguably non-fiction as well. Mystery and its sub-genres are also able to utilize a larger palette of concepts and mediums, and there are more than a few genre authors out there who signed with publishing houses smart enough to utilize brand and art direction to prove it.

But within the world of sci-fi/fantasy, the art is pretty much stuck with the task of presenting to the reader a fairly non-speculative visual representation of the non-existent world we are about to enter. Paint and ink seem to be the medium of choice to achieve a realistic look that remains firmly rooted in fantasy — its properties, the artist’s hand and even the brush itself reminding us that this is man-made.

I haven’t read a true sci-fi book in awhile, but what’s been making me think of it more and more is the artwork of John Harris. Through coming across the random Orson Scott Card, Ben Bova or John Scalzi books I find when I hunt for books, I have really taken to his covers. His use of scale is unparalleled. One clearly feels there is an epic plot lurking in the pages based on the cover alone, but what initially piqued my interest was his use of abstraction.

Clearly capable of intricate technical detail as seen in his early works, it’s his soft, slightly surreal covers that I find most interesting. The pastel colors and abstract brush strokes grant an entirely new vision of science fiction, one slightly matured and without the need for fanfare. The fragmented images of spaceships and structures with their lack of detail actually allow the bigger picture to become the focus and we immediately feel the vastness of space and how small and minute we are in comparison.

It might be a while before I even have time to contemplate starting a new sci-fi series but if and when I do, it will surely have the art of John Harris on the cover. Everything he’s done artwork for just screams epic which is exactly what I like.

n my book jacket hall of fame, there is a special place for Rodrigo Corral. He is simply a genius. The meager sampling above does not begin to represent his rotating range of palettes and output. Like I’ve mentioned before, when I come across a really nice book cover I usually take a wild guess as to who could have designed it. Although I can spot a John Gall or Barbara deWilde cover a mile away, I will never be able to spot a Rodrigo Corral cover. Just the other day I found a small chap book on philosophy with a simple design: a solid green block with a thin white border and white serif letters. It was minimal perfection and I was curious who designed it. I flipped to the back flap and yep, Rodrigo Corral.

His ability to produce stunning results in a variety of styles and techniques is clearly evident in his work for author Chuck Palahniuk. I don’t know if it’s Chuck or his publishers, but who ever it is they really let Mr. Corral go to town. From the gold ink on the cover of Survivor to the use of Jacob Magraw-Mickelson’s illustration for Rant, these are some of the most adventurous and beautiful covers out there. And better yet, they have meaning.

Although I love well designed book covers, I take a special interest in the ones that actually portray aspects of the novel itself. Particularly those aspects that become clear only after reading the book. For me this is the mark of a great dust jacket designer.

We’re all familiar with his cover for A Million Little Pieces which is brilliant, but the cover for My Friend Leonard is what kills me the most. It’s probably my second favorite book cover of all time (and definitely one of my favorite books). It’s a perfect example of a cover that means more to the reader once read. A cover that starts as a simple but lovely design and ends up being so much more.  You don’t just think of the book when you look at it, you actually see Leonard.  And for that, Rodrigo Corral will always have that special place in my dust jacket hall of fame.

he 60s and 70s saw the Netherlands experiencing what could only be called a cultural revolution, and as a result, has been producing cutting-edge art and design ever since. For me, it was the experimental music distributed from the Netherlands (to the U.S. via Portland Oregon, ironically) that started my interest and ever since it’s been a big plus sign for me when I stumble upon a band, book, or artist from the region. In this case it was a book.

I came across the Blommers/Schumm book Anita and was blown away by their work. Anita collects, alphabetically, portraits of people, mostly young women and men shot for various magazines as wells as work from their many exhibitions. I’m particularly loving the Class of 1998 series for Self Service Magazine where their mastery of microscopic detail and enormous vision are displayed to perfection.

Work from the Netherlands may be slightly too clinical for some, and the U.S. for example, seems to have a particular lack of interest, but I think it’s worth mentioning that I find the work coming from the Netherlands to be quite timeless. Most of the above photos are at least 12 years old, and yet they look like they were produced yesterday. And I still spin my Funckarma vinyl.

f you have any books or records from the mid 80s through the 90s, chances are you probably have one with a Carin Goldberg cover. After starting her own company Carin Goldberg Design in 1982, she was responsible for hundreds of book covers and went on to become a favorite for 80s album cover design. After expanding into the areas of identity and brand consultation, she has gone on to work with AIGA, design the Annual of the Type Directors Club and even consulted for Martha Stewart — all the while producing amazing design work for herself and her projects.

In the late 80s and early 90s, Goldberg brought typographic experiments, nouveau elements and collage to the forefront of dust jacket design, which was no small feat as the various marketing departments of the various major publishing houses were still quite gun shy about experimenting with book covers. Nevertheless, her work changed the landscape of jacket design and set the stage for the adventurous covers we see today.

Design finally won the favor of marketing after several successful runs of redesigned older titles. Publishers and marketers had finally seen the light and they let their designers go to town. You can see from the samples above that Goldberg took full advantage of the new climate and dove in head first producing some of the boldest covers yet released. Her dust jacket for Wasted Beauty must have had the marketing department sweating bullets. I can just see the memos now: “Jack, we can’t use this. You can’t even read anything because the text is wrapped around the entire jacket. Steve, relax. She’s an award winning designer, and besides, you’re just going to piss off the art department. Let them learn the hard way if it bombs.” It didn’t bomb, obviously. Great design rarely does.

world was made up in his head. It had landmasses, railways, and large bodies of water. There were creatures too; horses and birds and jellyfish. Humans also lived there; they ice-skated, climbed mountains that overlooked cities, and wore mascara. Some of the places looked very lonely, but several buildings displayed irregular patterns of boxy lights which may have indicated otherwise. One can’t be entirely sure. Some vacant buildings may have simply left their lights on in disguise, while other remained in the dark.

Over the course of four years, photographer Bertrand Fleuret looked for specific kinds of images. Things had to be precise, he said. Porcelain was fine, but plastic was not, trains were okay, but cars and planes were not. He defined the nature and texture of his fictional land with 35mm black and white photographs, published last year in a photobook titled, Landmasses and Railways. The science fiction film Soylent Green, Chris Marker’s experimental travelogue Sans Soleil, Tarkovsky’s psychodrama Solaris, and the cosmic sounds of Sun Ra were among his various provocations.

Though the book is divided into five chapters like a novel, it’s not meant to have a narrative, or any narrative at all. As he explained in an interview with Mårten Lange, “People looking for a story in Landmasses and Railways might end up disappointed. There is a progression through a fictional landscape but it is very linear and basic; a crash landing, a journey towards a city, the exploration of that city, then an escape and fading into nature. It is up to the viewer to imagine his own story and meanderings through that world. There are some ideas, moods or sensations I wanted to put in there, for example, a feeling that as we go further  into the journey we cannot go back, a certain timelessness of the place with a clash between medieval and futuristic aesthetics, etc.”

It was The Risk of an Early Spring, Fleuret’s first photobook that pulled me into his undertow. His photographs always felt like the final frame of a story in which I desperately tried to recall: the faint places, faces, and names that are like haunting strangers; a phone number you remember except for the last two digits; those empty but somehow meaningful things. The nuances and fragility of human memory. If a comparison could be made to music, I’d say it galvanized similar feelings to when I first dropped the needle on Burial’s track, Broken Home.

Paris-born, Fleuret has spent the past twenty years away from his home town in London and Amsterdam, and now resides in Berlin. More recently, post Landmasses and Railways, he has been distributing Remora, an anonymous zine consisting of 16 sheets of spontaneously-shot photographs. One-hundred copies of each issue are photocopied and placed in transparent sleeves and glued in different street locations to reach random audiences. Half of the fun is watching people react to Remora, in which Fleuret had remarked, “I often see some copies torn apart on the sidewalk as if someone had been really irritated. Only once I witnessed someone looking at a copy carefully and taking great care to put it back in the envelope and then in his bag to take it home; it was nice.” He compared Remora to a blog, except it’s anonymous, and Google can’t find it, nor can people leave comments. (Although Fleuret had not expressly indicated such, the word remora is a clever name thoughtfully chosen for the purpose of his project. Remora are fishes that have sucking disks by which they can attach themselves to sharks, turtles, ships, and other moving objects.)

When asked if he’d like to exhibit Landmasses and Railways in the near future, he said yes — the big prints would provide an impact that the book form could not. Meanwhile, if you want to take a closer look at Fleuret’s work, consider picking up Landmasses and Railways or The Risk of an Early Spring — both are amazing. If you’re strapped for cash, good news: both books are available as free PDF downloads. It’s not as wonderful as having the real thing in your hand, but at least the photos are much larger than I have on display in this post, resulting in what I’d imagine to be more of an elucidating and poignant experience.

random pages from the raw shark texts

xperimental type as a medium has never gotten old. From expressive Russian posters to the Dada movement, or even going further back to Lewis Carroll, we have a rich history of manipulating the written word to achieve new ways of communication. Although most of our contemporary examples exist within art communities and design circles, the concept has nevertheless found its way into more than a few mainstream formats.

Here are three examples of experimental text in novels that recently caught my eye. I’ll be straight up with you here, I haven’t read any of these books (although I’ve started the Raw Shark texts), but as you take a look at their interiors, I’m sure you’ll see why I want to.

House of Leaves is a horror story of sorts, seemingly about a house that is larger on the inside than on the outside. I just love the insane amount of text manipulation and design here. One really cool aspect for example, is throughout the book, the word house is printed in blue. The type ranges from simple romans to old school typewriter faces, with plenty of handwritten and illustrated letters throughout.

What can be said about David Mamet that hasn’t already been said? Playwright, author, screenwriter and director. However, Wilson comes right out of left field for any fan of his typical work. Taking place in the not-too-distant future, the internet crashes and humanity has lost its memory, leaving only downloaded material from which to reconstruct their history.

I’ve included Wilson in this post because of its excessive use of footnotes which take on a life of their own, sometimes taking up entire pages.

I’ve saved the best for last. Where House of Leaves uses the experimental format exclusively, The Raw Shark Texts is the most free of extravagance and uses only a minimal count of text and type experiments, and as far as I can tell, only appear within the specific and significant actions that take place in the book. The plot – plot used loosely here, revolves around an amnesiac searching for his past while on the run from a ‘conceptual fish’ that feeds on human memories. It’s quite interesting so far with well-deserved comparisons to the cerebral styles of Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster.

my holocaust by tova reich

my holocaust close up

my holocaust spine

my holocaust back cover

just love this cover. From the beautiful type to the illustrations to the entire concept, Roberto de Vicq de Cumpitch has created yet another perfect dust jacket. Straight away, the viewer is instantly aware of the irony between the images and title which clearly indicates you’re in for some dark humor.

My Holocaust and its plot revolving around a holocaust memorial museum is quite dark indeed, having little to nothing to do with the actual holocaust outside of its money-making potential. To this end, the confusingly cute dust jacket works perfectly in illustrating the novel’s blatant lack of actual horror usually associated with anything holocaust related.

This cover is a perfect example of what all great dust jacket designers have in common — the ability to really capture the spirit of the book itself.  The success of this cover is no surprise as Roberto has been designing and working in the book industry for some time now, working in roles ranging from illustrator to author. He is currently works as a creative at Harper Collins and continues to design and publish beautiful books, usually featuring his obvious love of type. His children’s book Bembo’s Zoo is illustrated entirely using the typeface Bembo, for example.

Although some of his dust jacket work falls outside my personal interest, I know this is just a taste and style issue. All his work passes the tests in both the art and marketing departments — the yin and yang of the industry. He is obviously a dope designer and his mastery of multiple graphic playing fields ranging from minimalism to elaborate fold outs (see his portfolio) easily places him in my dust jacket hall of fame.

great children’s book should not only stir the imaginations of young minds, but have staying power that lasts through adulthood. A great children’s book should leap out of its genre because its appeal and charm is universal. If I had found Jake Sargeant’s book All Types of Monsters on a bookshelf as a kid, I’d be both intrigued and delighted. My friends and I would have taken turns creating our own monsters, pitting them against one another in brute glory. It’s a book that doesn’t tell one particular story, but many, and most importantly, puts the reader(s) in charge of what they want to see and read — over 120 fun combinations, such as, “This calamitous mongrel / ate Barney for breakfast / and has a Boy Scout posse”.

As an adult now (or so I’m led to believe), this book still excites me. The mention of letterpress and typography is like Pavlovian conditioning for designers; we begin to salivate at the very enunciation of the words. Each monster’s personality is set in a particular typeface, and glyphs from sans serifs to grotesques to scripts make up the form of the beasts in a calligram-like manner. My only critique of the book concerns color: it would have been lovely with more of it, ostensibly being more exciting for the child than the grown-up. (I do, though, love the black.)

Jake received formal training in print design, but is self-taught in motion design, which seems to be his current focus at mn8 studio based in Santa Monica, California. The rest of his portfolio is definitely work checking out. Though he has few print projects, his motion design, storyboards, and photography definitely make up for it.

hen I come across an interesting book cover, I always take note of who designed it. Through that process I’ve repeatedly come across the work of John Gall. But previously, I’ve always had some sort of particular reason for not including him on my favorites list. I guess at the time I was hot for wild typography and I thought his choices were a little on the safe side. I was new and predictably focused on the cutting edge, only seeking those jackets that just made my mouth water. Basically, I wasn’t looking at the big picture.

The thing I was failing to factor in at the time was the publication date on a few of John’s covers. In retrospect, what you find when you factor in these dates is that you actually are looking at the cutting edge. His reliance on a small set of effective typefaces and solid graphic design techniques creates a timeless quality that’s both exciting and marketable — and therefore adopted. What I thought were basic graphic design 101 covers were actually John schooling the industry. Obviously many designers were listening but unfortunately, a few major publishing houses weren’t.

This is a little off topic, but look at this 1991 supposedly updated version of Philip K. Dick’s The Transmogrification of Timothy Archer compared to the 1982 original. John Gall’s updates on the other hand, look as fresh today as they when they first came out — check out his 1989 cover for for the 50th anniversary of Lolita for example. By the way, there’s actually a funny story behind the cover itself, which he elaborates on in a 2007 interview with Fwis. Despite being hilarious, it’s also quite informative (and could have been subtitled, “How not to place a photo”).

Naturally, Mr. Gall became the go-to guy after the book was published and therefore his relationship with Nabokov cover design didn’t end with Lolita. That’s a good thing right? Well, as art director for Vintage, he was already responsible for the oversight of a tremendous amount of book covers, not to mention his own, when this dream/nightmare job of working with the entire Nabokov catalog finally came true. With twenty-one titles, he must have had one of those be careful what you wish for moments before setting out to find a concept for the design of the series, but nevertheless he soon found his inspiration in the author himself. Particularly his interest in collecting insects for display, a concept which he expands on in a guest writer post over at Design Observer. Gall then enlisted the talent of the multiple designers and friends including Barbara de Wilde, Chip Kidd, Carol Devine Carson, Rodrigo Corral and even Dave Eggers to design covers using the formula.

So go check your books. If you have anything under the Random House umbrella, you just might have a John Gall design in your collection. On a personal note, through researching for this post and reading John’s own words, I’ve really come to respect his point of view and therefore taken a closer look at not only his personal work, but his work as art director for Vintage. For instance The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire have gone on to film adaptations and I can’t help wonder to which degree did the beautiful Vintage covers helped spread the word about Stieg Larsson’s series. That  was the reason I first noticed the books. Either way, if a book is lucky enough to be published by Vintage, the cover is definitely safe under the skilled supervision of John Gall.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

o celebrate the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate, a literary division of HarperCollins, Apt Studio with Asylum Films made a short film using over a thousand books to create a world made out of stories. The stop-animation process was shot over two weeks in a makeshift North London studio, and “contains numerous in-jokes and references to the books it features, and everything, from the ships in port to the cinema in Soho to the man fishing in Central Park is made out of books, covers, pages and words.”