Behind the scenes with D&M Publishers’ award-winning design team

In April, the design team for D&M Publishers swept the annual Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada, receiving 13 prizes in total. In the June issue of Q&Q, the team discusses the process behind their award-winning book designs.

I Am a Japanese Writer, by Dany Laferrière
I wanted to play ironically with the melding of cultures and cultural stereotypes, as Dany does in the text. I thought of making a Japanese voodoo doll. It took a while to source a head for the doll. I ordered this one from Japan, and then I had to hand-stitch the body. It’s made of burlap, stuffed with fabric scraps, and it’s about a foot high. I don’t really know how to sew, and burlap isn’t the easiest thing to stitch, so the back of the doll is kind of a mess. The photo is by John Sherlock. – Peter Cocking, art director

The Divinity Gene, by Matthew J. Trafford
I was obsessing over illustrators who specialize in hand-lettering and was waiting for an opportunity to use that aesthetic on a cover. This seemed like the perfect fit: a book of quirky, fun short stories. My first design was a type-only illustration layered atop of a string of linked paper dolls I cut out and scanned. The author and publisher felt it was too stark. I reworked the concept and began to draw characters and bits and pieces from each story, including my original string of paper dolls, which I was loath to see die. I even illustrated the author photo. – Jessica Sullivan, senior designer

Cigar Box Banjo, by Paul Quarrington
It was daunting being asked to tackle the cover of Paul Quarrington’s memoir, especially because I hadn’t designed that many books before. I decided to focus on the aesthetics of Cuban cigar boxes because they have the lively exuberance I felt celebrated Quarrington’s achievements. The decorative ribbons provided a perfect opportunity to express the melodic nature of his career by doubling them up as music bars.
– Heather Pringle, junior designer

Vij’s at Home, by Meeru Dhalwala and Vikram Vij
There was talk of doing something textural to tie in with the first Vij’s cookbook. The warm, inviting wood table – central to the authors’ family meals – seemed like the perfect backdrop, especially because most of the interior food images were shot against it. The authors, Peter Cocking, photographer John Sherlock, and I worked together to stage the shot. The modern type treatment was chosen to balance the photo’s delicate elegance and to match the interior design.
– Naomi MacDougall, designer

Students prefer print for look, feel, and font

Two recent studies shed some light as to why e-books haven’t caught on with students – they don’t feel right, and they make the work too easy.

Earlier this month, the Book Industry Study Group released “Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education,” a report that claims 75 per cent of students polled prefer print textbooks to e-books, largely because of their “look and feel.”

A few months prior to the BISG report, a study conducted by Princeton University psychologists found students achieved higher grades when they studied from material written in difficult fonts, including the widely scorned Comic Sans. Apparently, these fonts require readers to put more effort into reading, which leads to more information retained. Easier-to-read typefaces like Arial, Caecillia, or Times New Roman – the preferred fonts of many textbooks and e-books – make it too easy for readers to passively consume the written word.

“When we see a font that is easy to read we’re able to process that in a mindless way, but when we see an unfamiliar font, one full of weird squiggles, we have to work a little bit harder […] All the extra work, the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words – wakes us up,” explains science writer Jonah Lehrer at the Daily Mail Online.

Books of the Year 2010: Covers of the Year

There’s no formula for choosing the books of the year. Some break ground, some tackle familiar themes with new energy. Some represent the best work from established authors, some introduce us to important new voices. And some are simply in-house favourites we feel deserve a little more attention. Here are the 5 most notable book covers of 2010.

Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good
by John Gould (HarperCollins Canada)
Cover design by David Gee

I like this cover for so many reasons, one of them being that it doesn’t rely on bland and obvious stock photography. It’s simple, effective, and ­geometrical. It does what a good cover should do: it instantly grabs my attention and piques my interest. It does not rely on a visual representation­ of the book’s content, which can really hobble a cover design. I don’t­ ­instantly know what the book is about, but that’s why flap copy was ­invented, and this cover made me stop to read the flap. – Jessica Sullivan, senior ­designer at Douglas & McIntyre

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The publishing industry – this week in quotes

“We are not going to be stripped of our heritage for the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is. We are not going to be deprived of what generations and generations have produced in the French language just because we weren’t capable of funding our own digitisation project.” – Nikolas Sarkozy, on France vs. Google, in The London Telegraph

“Poets always react to one another’s work. One generator of great poetry is the response of one poet to a provocative poem by another. That’s how the conversation with the past and tradition occurs, but it’s also how the conversation with the present occurs.” – poet A.F. Moritz, on editing The Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books) in the National Post

“Numerous books, which aren’t available electronically, end up pirated. Attempting to prevent piracy by not making a book electronically available won’t stop the book from showing up as a pirated material, but it will show a lack of willingness to meet the demands of a hungry audience.” – P. Bradley Robb, responding to Sherman Alexie’s appearance on the Colbert Report, on Fiction Matters

“Doug may not recall this, but I remember him strolling into our art department at St. Martin’s Press in New York, looking (aside from the preppy sweater) like any of the other young, jeans-clad designers there. He was quiet spoken and it was the most casual of exchanges, but seeing him added a slight electrical charge to the project: he was our age. One of us. Books quite like this – about, conceived and designed by twentysomethings – hadn’t come around very often. Let’s face it, ever. There was a moment of glee as I realized the possibilities. I could go to town with the design or deliberately underplay, knowing that the team would’”get’ whatever cultural references I toyed with.” – Book designer Judith Stagnitto Abbate on designing Generation X, from the CBC Canada Reads blog

Nabokov backlist gets a face lift

The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov’s final work, has just been released. To coincide with its publication, Vintage has commissioned new cover designs for the 21 Nabokov backlist titles to which it owns rights.

Of course, publishers do this kind of repackaging all the time. (HarperCollins Canada recently did likewise for a couple of Douglas Coupland titles.) What makes this particular instance interesting is the way the covers were created. According to print magazine, John Gall, Vintage’s art director, commissioned a number of well-known designers, but told them they had to work within certain parameters:

Gall gave the designers one stipulation: each cover would be a photograph of a specimen box, a nod to Nabokov’s passion for butterfly collecting. Within the framework of the box, and using layers of paper and insect pins, the designers were free to create more or less what they wished. The new versions have been rolled out as existing back stock of old editions are depleted. “I thought that using the different designers would be a way to keep people interested in what was coming,” Gall says. “People stop paying attention after the major books are issued. I wanted them all to be important. So many backlist redesigns just slip themselves onto the bookshelves barely noticed.”

The article contains examples of the resulting work, including the covers for the novels Glory and Despair, and the memoir Speak, Memory. One of Quillblog’s favourites is the redesign of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which features a stark red, white, and black colour scheme, with an open book “pinned” inside the box.

On the print site, designer Sam Potts explains the rationale behind the cover:

The specimen box was daunting because it’s such a great idea as a frame for the whole series that I was intimidated to come up with something that would serve the series well. The idea of the small book came directly from the novel itself – it’s the story of the narrator’s pursuit of another author, who is his brother. So the book-within-a-book is embedded in the story itself. Luckily, John liked the idea and we went ahead with it. Hopefully people will see the connection between the splayed book and the way butterflies are splayed in specimen boxes.

Judging a book by its cover

Toronto typographer Nick Shinn, renowned around the world for his typeface designs, has spurred much debate on the Typophile.com forums with his recent post about “the dire state of book typography.” Using the terribly dull-looking U.S. edition of last year’s bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music, by McGill professor Daniel Levitin, as an example, Shinn tears into what he sees as fundamental problems with the book’s overall design, noting, “It severely pains me to read the damn godless thing, which is frustrating, as it’s quite interesting, and I would like to finish it.”

Shinn’s post, which breaks down everything from the book’s dreary cover to the margins of the inside text, has sparked a lengthy discussion on the Typophile message board by both industry professionals and everyday book readers about contemporary book design.

Many of the respondents point out the vast differences in book design in North America versus other territories, noting that a good case in point is Shinn’s own example: the UK edition of This is Your Brain on Music boasts a far more eye-catching cover, for instance, than the American one.

Bookmarks – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, reading for fun, etc.

Some book-related links:

• Crime and Punishment – the opera (The Moscow Times)
• War and Peace – the mini-series (The Moscow Times)
• A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – the Wii (kidding)
• More War and Peace, this time from critic James Wood (The New Yorker)
• The best (American) book covers of 2007 (The Book Design Review)*
• Read for fun, be smarter (Washington Post)
• Speaking of reading for fun, do pulp novels need hard times? (Bookforum)

* For the best Canadian covers of the year, as picked by some our top book designers, pick up Q&Q’s special “Books of the Year” December issue, coming very soon.