Angry Robot – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

The Eighth Court

Mid-January and here’s the first book cover design of the year, and another title for Angry Robot. This is the fourth book in Mike Shevdon‘s Courts of the Feyre series; since I’d already provided the three earlier books with a uniform design it didn’t take long to create this one. I’ve been very pleased with the reception of these covers, the positive response shows that it’s possible to design something for a fantasy series that isn’t the customary generic illustration plus florid typography. I wrote about the problems of designing fantasy covers last year with a lengthy examination of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books.

Two recent Angry Robot covers: Joey HiFi‘s cover for Chuck Wendig and Amazing15‘s Pelican-styled design for Chris F. Holm.

Credit should be given to Angry Robot’s Marc Gascoigne for encouraging this direction, the company has been producing a range of very smart covers which don’t pander to the clichés of the marketplace. There’s more of an incentive for smaller publishers to do this when small press imprints and self-publishers often have terrible cover designs (sad but true) while the multinationals play safe for fear of losing readers. If you want to stand out from the crowd then it helps to look good.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Courts of the Feyre

On self-imitation

Or where Angry Robot leads, HarperCollins follows… The Law of Divine Compensation by Marianne Williamson is published today in the US by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, and if the cover looks similar to Mike Shevdon‘s recent edition of Sixty-One Nails it’s because I designed both of them. Harper’s contacted me earlier this year asking if I could adapt the Sixty-One Nails design for their new Marianne Williamson title. I was a bit unsure about accepting this at first but Ms Williamson isn’t a novelist so the books wouldn’t be appearing on the same shelves; I also said I’d prefer to create new decorative elements so there was enough difference between the new design and the earlier one. In the end the design was pared back considerably during the usual to and fro between art department and marketing people. Harper’s previous titles in this series have quasi-Victorian border designs on plain backgrounds so there needed to be some continuity. I haven’t seen a copy of the book itself yet but the last I heard the design was going to be given a foil treatment on textured paper.

It’s always an odd feeling being asked to imitate something you’ve done before. The new work often lacks the sense of accomplishment and exploration you felt earlier because you know exactly how it’s going to end up. When I started work on Mike Shevdon’s covers all I had in mind was that basic frame shape; everything else was improvised. I still prefer those earlier designs, I like the way all the details came together, and the way they look against a black background. Mike told me recently that someone picked up one of the books in a shop to look at the cover then bought the book; that’s exactly the kind of thing a cover designer (and author!) likes to hear.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Book talk
• The Courts of the Feyre

World Fantasy Awards

Presenting some of the cover art and interior illustration from 2011 which won me the World Fantasy Award for best artist in Toronto on Sunday. (The complete awards list is here.) It was a surprise to be nominated, and even more of a surprise to win since working in different areas—book, music, comics—is never a good way to get noticed for doing one particular thing. It’s also the case that sf/fantasy art awards tend to favour painters or virtuoso digital artists over people such as myself who I suppose are more illustrator-designers; that’s not a criticism, just an acknowledgement of the strength and popularity of highly-refined pictorial art in this area of the literary world. The recognition hazard works in the opposite direction: the design world often gives the most attention to graphic design alone, with the illustration quotient being regarded as secondary content.

I’m not exactly sure what the judges were looking at of my work so these examples have been chosen for being published during the year under examination. They’re also covers that people seemed to like a lot, especially KW Jeter‘s Morlock Night (even though I still prefer Infernal Devices!), and those for Mike Shevdon‘s books. The Jeter and Shevdon volumes are all published by Angry Robot who will also be publishing Lavie Tidhar‘s The Bookman Histories early next year sporting another of my covers. Lavie’s novel Osama won best novel in Toronto while Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (editors of the Lambshead book below) picked up a best anthology award for their monumental The Weird. And to add to the good company, my regular publishers Tachyon saw one of their authors, Tim Powers, gaining best story collection. Congratulations to everyone, and a big thanks to Ann for collecting my award.

I’m always using these posts to point to other artists so it’s only right that I encourage everyone to go and look at the work of the other nominees. Here they are (although Jon Foster’s site appears down at the moment):

• Julie Dillon
• Jon Foster
• Kathleen Jennings
• John Picacio

John Picacio has a rather gorgeous calendar due out soon, details here.

Title page for The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Harper Voyager).

Continue reading “World Fantasy Awards”

The Bookman Histories

Now that Angry Robot books has revealed the cover design which kept me busy throughout July I can do the same here. The Bookman Histories is an omnibus reprinting of Lavie Tidhar‘s steampunk trilogy which comprises The Bookman, Camera Obscura and The Great Game. The stories are frenetic, crowded with incident and feature a huge range of characters that find real people such as Jules Verne and Harry Houdini encountering contemporaries—both human and non-human—from the fiction of the late 19th century. All the requisite steampunk boxes are ticked. David Icke will be thrilled to know that in these books the British royal family are a bunch of lizards from space…

My initial impulse when faced with far too much material was to cram every square centimetre of the cover with detail but if I’d have done that I’d probably still be working on it, and would also have run the risk of it turning into an incoherent mess. So this layout, which is crowded enough, is something of a compromise. I also wanted to save some space for the title design.

The main body of the title isn’t a font but was created from scratch based on letterforms and decorative elements from this fantastic set of fire insurance title pages. I’d been wanting to try something based on these hand-drawn designs ever since Mr Peacay posted them at BibliOdyssey last year. This particular design provided the basic letter shapes although I had to invent several of missing characters.

In the third part of the trilogy the Martians from HG Wells’ War of the Worlds invade, so I spent rather too much time fashioning a Martian tripod from lots of tiny bits of machinery. This is one of the earlier drafts. It was an odd thing finishing this cover (which includes the planet Mars in the background) whilst the world was getting excited by the real landing on Mars of the Curiosity Rover.

The Bookman Histories will be published in March next year. Meanwhile there’s more steampunk design on its way. Watch this space.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aether Cola
• Crafting steampunk illustrations
• SteamPunk Magazine
• Morlocks, airships and curious cabinets
• The Steampunk Bible
• Steampunk Reloaded
• Steampunk overloaded!
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts

Book talk

I posted my covers for the Angry Robot editions of Mike Shevdon’s Courts of the Feyre series last month. Last week Mike asked me to answer a few questions about the design process and related matters. The answers are now posted on his blog where I discuss art, book design, favourite reading and a couple of the things I plan to foist on the world in the near future.

Not mentioned there but due on the shelves later this year is The Graphic Canon, a collection of adaptations in comic strip and illustration form of literary works from the Epic of Gilgamesh on. Seven Stories Press is the publisher, Russ Kick is the editor, and my contribution is a condensation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The first of the three volumes will be out in April. More about that later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Courts of the Feyre