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Many of us have a book inside ourselves that we would like to write. For those who have written that book and are ready to publish, there are numerous options in today’s market. The InStock conference, in San Francisco on Saturday July 18, will examine all sides of the issue. I’ll be part of a panel called, “Do Judge a Book By It’s Cover”.

A number of independent publishers willingly take an author’s money to publish a book, but the results are often unsatisfactory. I worked as a design consultant with the iUniverse publishing house for over a year before they merged with AuthorHouse. The iUniverse model relied on consultants to coach a team of cover designers in a studio based in Shanghai. The Shanghai designers were unschooled and often did not speak English, although their computer skills were adequate. Needless to say, the results from China were uneven at best, and laughable in the worst cases. Extensive input from design consultants was necessary to arrive at a successful cover design.

What makes a great cover design? Original artwork, a strong typographic solution for the title and subtitle, and an intuitive sense from the designer of what the manuscript is about.

I designed the cover below for Harper San Francisco. A seasoned photographer, Pavlina Eccles, worked with me in her studio to create a stunningly lush image of red pears. The title treatment was custom drawn as vector artwork from an old type specimen. Lavish attention to detail was applied to the complete jacket and flaps. The result is a cover design that propelled the book to national success.  The same edition is still sold extensively, especially during holidays, 15 years after the original was published.

Not every cover requires a custom photograph or title treatment, but an experienced cover designer, who understands the language a book is written in, can ensure that a book gets the attention it deserves in a crowded market.

I’ve finished 5 new banners for a website design commissioned by the Department of Comparative Literature  at U.C. Berkeley. When the website is on the U.C. servers, I will post a link.

The banners use great material from the Bancroft Library, as well as the French Library at U.C. The example here showcases prints by Jack Stauffacher and a journal excerpt by Philip Whalen, mentioning that Kerouac was in town and they were hanging out at Ferlinghetti’s place in Big Sur. Other banners contain collages based on latin, arabic, hebrew, and old english texts. © The Bancroft Library

This classic and beautiful guide to BEAT Generation haunts in the Bay Area, is being reprinted by City Lights and will be available again soon. The walking tour guide, put together by master archivist Bill Morgan, allows you to retrace the steps of illustrious poets and artists who called the Bay Area home. The iconic cover photograph was shot by Larry Keenan.

This project was a favorite of mine, as I got to design with great images from the fabled “Days and Nights at City Lights” archive, a rich trove of over 50 years of photos and ephemera from CL. The book will assist any fan in locating storied places such as the apartment building where Ginsberg wrote Howl. Check it out. A walking tour is the perfect way to spend one of those incredible, non foggy, June days in San Francisco, followed up by a refreshment at Tosca!

A new cover design for City Lights publishers features a still from Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film, The Man with the Movie Camera. Life As We Show It will be coming out around June of this year. Vertov believed the camera could go anywhere and he pioneered cinematic techniques such as stop motion, freeze frames, double exposure and jump cuts. The collected writings on film that Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn have gathered, explore how movies become part of our own biography and personal history, as we absorb and digest the powerful images on screen.

The editors located this stunning black and white photo of an eye seen through the camera’s lens, and I used it to make a rich tritone, a perfect image for a book that examines the life of the imagination as embodied in cinema. The eye on the back looks great emerging from the rich black, in a circular crop of the same photo.

One of the touchstone artifacts of my childhood, is the Eames House of Cards. First created by Charles Eames in 1952, the House of Cards, is a simple slotted card deck that allows for quick construction of towers or buildings. It is the images printed on the cards that make this toy deck astonishing, photographs of what Eames called “good stuff”. Drawn from the general categories of animal, vegetable, or mineral, these images burst with color, pattern and the vibrancy of what, many years later, would become “world beat” folk art. (hard to say which category this image of pharmaceuticals falls into, but I really like how retro it is)

The card set I have is from the mid to late sixties. It was created by Creative Playthings under license to Eames. I’m sure that Alexander Girard had an influence on the design. Girard was a colleague of Eames, who brought the imagery to many of their projects. (Girards’s personal collection of folk art, on display at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe has the exact same feel as the House of Cards) The deck is still available from the Museum of Modern Art.

An incredible, custom deck was designed for IBM to hand out at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. All the photographs were of computer components.