Hey y’all,
Hope you don’t mind me skipping your inbox last weekend. It was a hell of a week with school district playgroups, doctor appointments, an almost three-year-old’s birthday party, my wife becoming full-time at her library, and two demanding freelance deadlines (not to mention my own full-time job!). This week has been only slightly less busy. But I have weathered the storm and live to write again despite my first real test of commitment to this newsletter.
What I’m Working On
Newsletter: Two weeks ago, I wrote about the design process behind Cinema Ann Arbor: How Campus Rebels Forged a Singular Culture. It’s a big coffee table book with hundreds of images and is one of the most important projects I’ve worked on.
Next week: who knows! Probably something about books 😉
New work for Wayne State University Press. I’m thrilled to get to work with a publisher that is both terrific and situated in my proverbial backyard. Click below to see some unused options.
While I always have my favorites, I would have been happy with any of these covers being published. This wasn’t always the case. I used to struggle to create multiple concepts I was happy with—I’d get stuck on one or two and limp to the requested number of options. I’m getting better, honing and trusting my process.
Here’s a little video I made about the process:
A coffee table book about the Daytona 500. Not my most ideal subject, but it’s been a fun project that has brought me full circle. This publisher works almost exclusively with newspapers as their clientele, publishing books of local history and sports the paper has covered. Early in my design career, I was a newspaper designer. Now I’m placing newspaper stories, photos, and scans into a book. If that wasn’t full circle enough, the Daytona Beach News-Journal is owned by the same organization that owned the papers I used to design. Which means there were some very familiar fonts, colors, and story teasers.
This week I asked followers what they want to know about book design as fodder for an upcoming newsletter.
What about you dear reader? Is there anything you’d like to know about book design?
At the library: The poster and social media graphics for this year’s A2 Community Bookfest.
What I’m Reading
I needed a break from books about writing and serious nonfiction, so I turned to The Expanse, the science fiction series I’ve slowly been making my way through the last few years. I just finished book 3, Abaddon’s Gate, last night. It may seem counterintuitive, but when I’m busy I love to read these doorstops of a book that give me some good escapism. Space opera!
I recently reread The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s a small little essay-length book about her feelings on, you guessed it, book covers. I can’t stop thinking about it and am probably going to write a newsletter about some of the things Lahiri talks about.
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that a cover is a sort of translation, that is, an interpretation of my words in another language — a visual one. It represents the text, but isn't part of it. It can't be too literal. It has to have its own take on the book.
This tribute to a friend who died.
“The Art of the Design Shtick”
That’s all for this time. Thanks for reading! I hope you find some value in these “notebook” roundups.
Until next time,
Nathaniel