Ten titles and a cover

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The Very Best of Charles de Lint. Art by Charles Vess.

Over the weekend I found the time to finally update the book design section of the site, adding new pages for most of the titles I’ve been working on recently. There’s still a couple of things missing but I’ll add those in due course. Many of these design jobs have been for the interiors only so what follows is a comparison of title spreads from books I’ve worked on that have been published this year. Lest it seem that I have an army of clones at my service it should be emphasised that I was working on several of these last year (and Engelbrecht was completed in 2008) but the nature of release schedules means they all carry 2010 publication dates.

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Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

I invariably make a feature of title pages, usually creating them as a spread in order to heighten their impact. The title page is a kind of gateway to the rest of the book which gives you an opportunity to establish a mood for what follows. It’s also the area where you can be most lavish with your graphic treatment and, where necessary, add illustrative material without worrying too much about intruding on the content. With a number of these designs I was following typographic choices from pre-designed covers so the challenge was to find something that would match the cover and connect to the rest of the interior. The Charles de Lint book was a variation on this process in that the author had chosen a Charles Vess drawing for the cover art. I designed a cover to accommodate the drawing then carried the design inside. The colours were chosen to match Vess’s artwork while the general Art Nouveau style came from an Alphonse Mucha poster he’d placed on the wall. With a different cover picture the entire book would have had a very different design.

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The Search for Philip K Dick by Anne R Dick.

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Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock, edited by John Davey.

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The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson. Illustrations by Kris Guidio and James Boswell.

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Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow.

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The Very Best of Charles de Lint.

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The Best of Joe R Lansdale.

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The Secret History of Fantasy, edited by Peter S Beagle.

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The Secret History of Science Fiction, edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel.

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The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

22 thoughts on “Ten titles and a cover”

  2. Thanks, I wanted Engelbrecht to look like an old playbill or poster design. You’d probably like the book as well, the stories at times approach Monty Python for their absurdity and invention.

    For Savoy I do everything, inside and out. For Tachyon the majority of books have been interiors but there’s been a few where I’ve done the covers as well. I don’t mind concentrating on the interior alone, it can still be a lot of work and having someone else design the cover sometimes pushes things in a direction you might not otherwise explore.

  3. Where does the image of all the lines radiating out on the Secret History of SF come from?
    I’m sure I’ve seen it somewhere else before but can’t remember where

  5. Ha. It’s the cosmic map from the plaque on Pioneer 10. Not sure how many people have figured that out. The cover of the book has a spacecraft detail on it so I wanted a graphic that implied space travel while remaining abstract.

    Oops, your comment crossed mine.

  9. Thombeau
    Mystery date is obviously Shirley Maclaine wearing the dress she used in Irma la Douce.

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