The Northhampton, MA-based artist is set to release their third collection of poems this coming March, provocatively entitled Big Money Porno Mommy. With a title like that, one needs an equally compelling cover, which Weiss was able to not only envision but also bring to life.

“Big Money Porno Mommy is about power and desire. It’s about pornography and my choice to not become a mother. It’s about the male gaze and how it’s wielded. It’s about all of these things in the context of my body, which happens to be a fat body,” Weiss penned in a piece they wrote reflecting on the book and its cover. “The physical forms of those we love and lust after—even the bodies we idealize—they’re all kind of ridiculous when you get close enough.”

The cover of Big Money Porno Mommy encapsulates this playfulness, capturing both the grotesque and the organic beauty inherent to the human body. The ability to harmonize two ideas that might initially seem at odds with one another is central to Weiss’ practice as a poet and something they were keen on evoking in their book’s cover.

“I needed the flesh to be forefront. I wanted to evoke fatness and nudeness but without a silhouette—fatness as the text itself. Many people have instinctive reactions to the form of a fat body. I wanted this cover to elicit a reaction, but rather than othering the form, and projecting whatever preconceived notions about fatness they may have onto my book, I wanted to bring the audience in.”

After seeing the cover of Big Money Porno Mommy and reading Weiss’s initial thoughts on their process, I was eager to talk to the artist. My Q&A with Weiss, in which I dig even deeper into their process and their reconciliation of clashing concepts, is transcribed below.

(Edited lightly for clarity and length.)

The physical forms of those we love and lust after—even the bodies we idealize—they’re all kind of ridiculous when you get close enough.

Catherine Weiss

What’s your process typically like for writing your poems?

When I think about writing poems, I try to see if a poem can do more than one thing at a time. It’s hard to write a poem that’s just about one thing, I have found. When I sit down to write a poem, I have two ideas, and then maybe the third thing that comes out of it is the poem. So when I was thinking about designing this cover, I was similarly interested in having more than one idea. 

The cover is so striking. What was your thought process behind that design?

I was also interested in having the typography contain this fleshiness, so you get the information from what the words literally say, but I also wanted the typography to give information as well. Having the title literally embodied in flesh was one way to do that. Then layering the little details of specificity onto the letters, like, Is there a belly button? Is that a tuft of hair? Things that would both hopefully draw someone in to look, and also be a little bit like, Ooh, do I want to look at this? To have that push and pull. 

The typography definitely captures that two-things-at-once idea you’re going for. It’s pretty grotesque, but simultaneously warm and pillowy and even comforting which complicates that initial disgust. At what point in the writing process did you design the cover? 

Once I had about half of the poems, I said, Okay, well, this is a collection. This is going to be something. And I had the title, and I kept writing poems to keep adding, so that’s when I started brainstorming what the cover would possibly look like. I kept coming back to this idea of flesh letters and fat rolls. An early iteration looked more like Sharpie on my stomach, and I thought about having a photograph instead of doing it digitally. But at a certain point I realized I needed to learn the software to make my vision happen. 

One of the things about writing the poems and designing the cover is that I got to spend a lot of time with both of them. I got to spend a ton of time with this cover. I kept iterating and putting it in a drawer and then coming back to it as more poems got written.  

Can you speak about that technical side of things in terms of the cover? What software did you use? What was your design process like? 

This is created in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Illustrator has a very simple tool that allows you to blow up text or other shapes to inflate them in this faux 3D space. Once I realized that tool was pretty simple and I could play with it by adding skin texture, I spent a lot of time finding the right skin texture to make it look as gross as possible. 

I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the shape of the letters was going to be, because I wanted it to be legible. The first iteration was much more blocky and the letters were separated from each other, so it looked a little bit more like someone had been chopped up. That wasn’t quite right and that was also much harder to read. 

I didn’t really spend much time sketching but iterating in the software. How far can I distort this letter pattern to make it legible and also to get the effect that I’m looking for? 

What was your thought process behind the colors of the cover, particularly the magenta-to-orange gradient background behind the flesh-toned lettering? 

Until quite late in the process, I had a different background entirely. For a long time, it was a comforter, pillowcase sort of texture. Ultimately I didn’t stick with that because it was just a stock photo that didn’t really interact with the weight of the letters, and it was taking attention away from the letters themselves. 

I wanted the cover as a whole to pop, so I knew I wanted something bright and cheerful, and I just love pink and orange. It’s been a color combination that I’ve been drawn to. Also, this is my third full-length collection, so I kept in mind my previous collection which was sort of a green. So, I thought, What do I want these books lined up on a shelf to look like? 

Now that the poems and cover are all done and dusted, what would you say you’re proudest of with what you’ve created? 

I think letting myself sit with the uncomfortable. Even with the cover, being able to forefront the discomfort while not giving up the joy that is found in this collection. 

This collection has a series of poems called “The Phone Sex Poem,” and they tell a story about a bad relationship and a boyfriend who was addicted to phone sex. They’re about the ramifications that it had on my life, and the reverberations going forward in terms of my relationship to sex and desire. 

On the face of it, that was a really hard thing to write about. I’d been aware that I’d been choosing not to write about it for several books, and I think it was really important for me to find an entry point that was playful in order to talk about a difficult subject. I think I found a balance that not only isn’t a bummer to read, but I also feel comfortable putting out into the world and telling my story in a way that feels holistic and worthwhile.

Look for Big Money Porno Mommy by Catherine Weiss on shelves in March 2025.

The post Catherine Weiss Embraces Discomfort in their Book of Poems, ‘Big Money Porno Mommy’ appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The 2025 PRINT Awards jury is like a masterfully curated bouquet. Each juror a unique bloom, contributing to a vibrant tapestry of creativity and expertise. Presenting your work before this panel is like planting it in a fertile field, where ideas are nurtured and celebrated for their ingenuity and potential to flourish.

This year, we welcome jury members from across the creative spectrum in traditional PRINT Awards categories, such as handlettering and type design, to new categories, including social media content design, title sequence design, and graphic novels.

At the heart of these new categories is the power of storytelling. And, like you, our jurors are masters of that craft.

One of these storytellers is Mike Nicholls, who will be looking at work in the Advertising and Editorial categories. An award-winning creative director, brand strategist, editorial designer, and visual artist out of Oakland, Mike wields design for discovery, inspiration, and community building. Mike also founded Umber, a media and editorial platform featuring creative perspectives that matter, having been recognized by AfroTech (Blavity), San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, and Communication Arts.

What gets me most excited is storytelling through design. Design to me is not just conveying an idea, it is creating an experience to spark a conversation.

Mike Nicholls

We’re also excited to welcome Dora Drimalas, who, along with her fellow jurors Pablo Delcan and Alex Lin, will review Annual Reports, Books-Covers, Jackets, Books-Entire Package, and Brochures & Catalogs.

Drimalas is the co-founder and executive creative director of Hybrid Design and also the co-founder of Super7. Her extensive background in brand strategy and graphic design has allowed her to work intimately on projects with some of the largest brands in the world, such as Nike, Sonos, The North Face, Google, Apple, Samsung, Mohawk Fine Paper, TED Conferences, Lego, Verizon, and Starwood Hotels, to name a few. Drimalas’ creativity innovates at the intersections of design, content, and culture within multiple mediums, always looking for new answers.

I am the most excited about the evolution of design and experiences. Design solves business problems in a visual and functional way. When it’s done well, it looks like magic and creates an experience that stands out. Embracing change can be scary, but it’s also where innovation lives.

Dora Drimalas

In addition to Mike Nicholls and Dora Drimalas, we’re thrilled to welcome the leading voices in their fields. While we are still adding to our stellar list of jury members for 2025, you can see who will be considering your work here.

Great design communicates ideas, evokes emotions, and connects with audiences on a deeper level, whether through illustration, packaging design, data visualization, or social media, going beyond function to tell a story that sticks. If your work tells a story that sparks ideas and fuels innovation, the PRINT Awards jury awaits!

The post The 2025 PRINT Awards Jurors Have Stories to Tell appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

We’re at this great nexus of being able to return focus to the book as an object, as a form of expression, and figuring out ways to do that so that it’s relevant to a contemporary audience.

Arion Press has been manually printing books on centuries-old equipment in San Francisco for 50 years, yet they are currently embarking upon a new beginning. The last vertically integrated bookmaker in the country, Arion Press was established in 1974 and has most recently been housed in San Francisco’s Presidio neighborhood. They officially opened their new doors in the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in October—after moving over 49 tons of antique equipment—and will soon be releasing their second title of the year, Fables of Aesop.

Arion Press is composed of a production team of six people, split between three departments: the foundry, the press room, and the book bindery. They also work with local bookbinder John Demerritt, and have an additional seven employees on the administrative side of things who spearhead development and programming. Arion Press’s lead printer and creative director, Blake Riley, was hired back in 2001 originally as one of the imprint’s first apprentices. I recently spoke with Riley on the occasion of all of this excitement, to learn more about the history of Arion Press, Fables of Aesop, and keeping the art of bookmaking alive.

(Lightly edited for clarity and length.)

Take me back to the origin of Arion Press. How did it all begin? 

We trace our lineage back in San Francisco to the late teens when Edwin and Robert Grabhorn came out from Indiana. Curiously, Edwin had been primarily a printer of music scores, which is a very niche, phenomenal process that has fallen entirely by the wayside at this point. They set up shop in San Francisco in the late teens and established the Grabhorn Press, which became one of the premier American fine press operations for decades, through the 60s. After Edwin passed away, the younger brother, Robert, ultimately went into partnership with Andrew Hoyem. When Robert died, Andrew founded Arion as an imprint in 1974, which is why we’re claiming this year as our 50th anniversary celebration. 

I know you started out at Arion Press as an apprentice. Can you tell me a bit more about the apprenticeship program? 

With maybe only one exception, everyone who works in production here has come up through this apprenticeship program. It’s ongoing and is considered a fundamental part of the activity that happens here. 

This is one of those professions or trades that is especially unique because it relies very heavily on this oral transmission of skills. There is a certain amount of book learning you can do around this; you can learn technique by reading repair manuals and that kind of thing. But to really have a sense for the sounds of the presses and to be able to see how hands work in relation to bring it all together, there’s no way to simulate that experience. So the apprenticeships became really instrumental in that.

By now, we’ve easily had over three dozen apprentices. Obviously, not all of them have stayed, some of them have gone on to work in other areas of the book arts or for other book arts organizations, or to teach, some of them have moved on altogether, but it actually has proven to be a very successful, robust lifeline for the press and for letterpress printing as a whole. 

I think a lot of other old trades and handcrafts are similar. I’m a sign painter, and I took a two-year sign painting course at LA Trade Tech College that’s not an apprenticeship per se, but it does replicate certain aspects of what an apprenticeship would offer. I learned from two sign painters who’ve been doing it for decades and who took the course themselves. The knowledge that they have is invaluable, and so much of it is just in their heads, so you really have to be in the room with them for two years in order to even scrape the surface of understanding sign painting.

A lot of it, too, is that the people who have that knowledge aren’t natural-born teachers, so there’s a lot that they don’t have words for. Or until a certain problem arises, it wouldn’t occur to them to explain the fix, or how you go about creating a fix for a problem that’s never arisen, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of that kind of knowledge that gets transferred by osmosis. 

What’s your favorite aspect of what you and your team do at Arion Press? 

Writ large, what’s most exciting about the work is that it’s such a dynamic moment to be involved with the book because it’s going through these radical changes. There’s this interesting division that’s occurred between knowledge and information. When people say, the web is going to be the death knell of the book! it’s really the opposite. What the web has done quite brilliantly is wrangle information and remove all of that encyclopedic burden from the book, which frees it up to do all of these other things. Meanwhile, the technologies for construction and manufacturing are changing so quickly that they are offering these wild new opportunities for ways in which books can actually physically be constructed. So we’re at this great nexus of being able to return focus to the book as an object, as a form of expression, and figuring out ways to do that so that it’s relevant to a contemporary audience.

What the web has done, quite brilliantly, is wrangle information and remove all of that encyclopedic burden from the book, which frees it up to do all of these other things.

Part of that is incorporating new technologies, and figuring out how the book can embrace those. That’s the most exciting thing for us: this project of invention and discovery. What that means in the day-to-day that is especially motivating is that it requires this incredible collaboration between all of the creative people who are involved in a project. That’s the artists within the publishing program, then working with the book binders and the guys in the foundry, and being able to coordinate everyone’s expertise to bring them into alignment with the concept for the project, and hopefully ending up with something that surprises everybody. It’s almost always the case that we never know where we’re going to end up, because the process is so organic.

I’m mesmerized by the ancient printing equipment and techniques you all have preserved and use to create your books. What’s it like working with such special and historic machinery day in and day out? 

A significant portion of the type collection here, which is the largest standing collection of metal type outside of the Smithsonian Institution, goes back to San Francisco printers at the end of the 19th century. Plus, ours is still employed; it’s still making books and printing words; it’s not just a research collection. The collection began to be compiled by the Grabhorns, who were great collectors. All of that adds up to what has been described as this irreplaceable cultural treasure designation that we were bestowed.

When working with the historic type collection, we may have a certain design in mind or a certain look for the typography, but when we go to the case it may turn out that we only have a partial alphabet of that particular typeface. So there are instances like that that arise daily where we have to pivot and devise a new solution based on all of the physical realities and constraints of working with 100-year-old equipment. That really leads to this ongoing, continuous conversation and evolution of every project where one thing leads to the next so that by the time we end up with the book finished and bound, it’s something that no one really could have anticipated. There’s a real excitement, joy, and delight associated with that. 

What’s it like keeping an old press and these antique technologies thriving within the context of San Francisco, a place dominated by big tech and digital innovation? 

The most facile metaphor for it is the interplay and relationship between radio and television, and the ways in which television actually ended up leading to the renaissance of radio that we’ve seen in the last couple of decades. We are by no means tech-averse. The monotype casters, for example, which were invented at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution in the 1890s, were the first word processors; they were cutting-edge technology for their day. So when the foundry was set up here in the Bay Area in 1915, it was cutting-edge technology. 

We are by no means tech-averse.

Originally, the monotypes were a two-part system where there was a paper tape that was punched on a hydraulic keyboard, and then that tape was fed onto the typecaster. But then the paper tape became complicated for various reasons, and about 15 years ago this beautiful digital interface was engineered that replaced that whole process. So now what we have is this 21st-century digital interface connected to the 19th-century caster that allows us to download a text from anything that’s in the public domain, format it, and convert it to be cast. It was this beautiful way, much like television and radio, that the new technology has moved in and helped buoy the old one. 

Another example that came up recently was when we worked on the Edgar Allen Poe collection. In the process of building that project, we stumbled upon this pile of bricks that had been rescued when NYU demolished Poe’s house in lower Manhattan. Unbeknownst to anyone, they moved in and raised the house, but it seems as if perhaps a mea culpa, they preserved the bricks. So all of a sudden we had these bricks, and there was this question of how we could incorporate them somehow into the book and enliven the experience that much more. What we ended up doing with them was working with a colleague of ours here in the Bay, John Sullivan, who had gotten into paper making and 3D printing. He created 3D molds into which we could grind the bricks down like a mortar and pestle and use the brick dust as a pigmentation in the pulp paper, and then we packed the molds. We ended up creating these three-dimensional cameos of Poe’s visage, and those were then embedded in the covers of the books. The paper-making is relatively ancient, but being able to create these cameos was made possible by technology only available within the last ten years. 

We’re really invested in that exploring, in breaking down the barrier between those two things and helping ensure that it’s a two-way communication from the digital to the analog, and from the analog back to the digital. They all happily coexist. 

Can you tell me more about Arion Press’s 50th anniversary celebration this year, and the Fables of Aesop collection you’re releasing as part of the milestone? 

We wanted to create something that would appropriately commemorate the press at this inflection point, while also accommodating the move. A year and a half ago, we didn’t exactly know what the move would entail other than it would happen within a six-month period and be completely disruptive and unpredictable. So we had to design a project that could somehow be modular and flexible enough to absorb this unexpected future. 

Those two things came together in Aesop. It seemed appropriate not only for its longstanding role in the history of printing— I came across one comment that said, second to the Bible, Aesop’s fables is the most printed work in the Western world. This makes a lot of sense because, for various historical and technical reasons, the fables lent themselves to the capacities and technologies of the day once moveable type was created. This is in part because of their brevity, but especially because of how visual they’ve always been. That allowed for this incredibly rich body of work to be created around them, and constantly reinvented. 

As I began to dive into the history of Aesop’s fables primarily at the Huntington Library, one thing that rose to the surface was how these morals that we’ve all grown up with and maybe have even been used to affect our behavior one way or another, have evolved over time. Once we got a bead on that, the project became very interesting because there was an opportunity to approach this in a way that’s relevant to the 21st century; what do these morals look like now? 

Also, because the morals are each self-contained in their way structurally, that allowed us the freedom that we needed to treat them individually. We could be printing each individual folio, which is how we will be presenting them, so that if production was interrupted, we could finish that one folio, pack it aside, move the operation, and pick up with the next folio. It also separated the binding from the printing. Typically when we finish the printing of a book, we have another three months of hand book-binding before the book can be released. But issuing it in a box as a collection of individual folios gave us the elbow room we needed. 

So we had this splashy box and these morals, and both of those things were the anchors for the project. That’s what led us to invite Kiki Smith as the primary visual artist to create a sculptural multiple to define the experience of the box, and to invite Daniel Handler (whom you might know as Lemony Snicket) to reinterpret the morals. We then began to invite other artists that we had worked with in the past to each choose one fable to interpret and create one print that we would print here in the shop by traditional letterpress relief printing techniques. We ended up with 15 artists with Kiki being the 16th, and 41 fables. 

The project allowed us to celebrate our community, it gave us a way to make a statement relevant to a contemporary audience, it gave us the flexibility to dance around the move, and it promised to be a lot of fun in the process.

Featured image above: Nick Bruno/Courtesy of Arion Press

The post Arion Press Keeps the Art of Bookmaking Alive While Looking to the Future appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

And if you’re still reeling from it, the holidays are a perfect time to get punch-drunk distracted on a bounty of brilliant book covers.

For as much insanity as the year held (and it was … a lot!), it was offset by a constant stream of cathartic tomes and jackets. To that end, in 2023 our annual December list featured 50 titles—and it has now doubled to 100. 

Some of my personal favorites: Thomas Colligans’ beautiful cover for Beautyland, which has been stuck in my head for the better part of a year. Janet Hansen’s work on Ask Me Again, is equal parts electrifying and haunting. Pablo Delcan’s genius VanderMeer covers the best encapsulations of the Southern Reach series since his Spanish editions. Arsh Raziuddin’s jacket for Knife. Alex Merto and Seymour Chwast’s Tom Wolfe reissues. Pete Adlington’s utterly perfect Not Waving But Drowning. Grace Han’s take on God of the Woods, which disproves the theory that great covers are only the stuff of niche imprints and genres and not mainstream bestsellers. And so many others, which you’ll see below.

Here’s to all the striking work in 2024, and all that we have to look forward to in 2025. There has truly never been a better time to get lost in a book—or a book cover.

The post 100 of the Best Book Covers of 2024 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

From a fresh face (or lack thereof) on some Murakami, to Dante’s Inferno as you’ve never seen it, to a psychedelic Clockwork Orange experiment, the rest of our favorite finds from the month(s) follow!

Publisher’s description:
With his bestseller Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates established himself as a unique voice in his generation of American authors, a brilliant writer and thinker in the tradition of James Baldwin.

In his keenly anticipated new book, The Message, he explores the urgent question of how our stories—our reporting, imaginative narratives and mythmaking—both expose and distort our realities. Traveling to three resonant sites of conflict, he illuminates how the stories we tell—as well as the ones we don’t—work to shape us.

The first of the book’s three main parts finds Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa—a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination. He then takes readers along with him to Columbia, SC, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology—visibly on display in this capital of the confederacy, with statues of segregationists still looming over its public squares. Finally, in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

What was the brief for this book? 
The brief was a very simple one: simplicity, strength, and a three-strand story. Then, a lot of discussion with the editor around really capturing the essence of the book. In terms of visuals, it was completely open.

Tell us about the blank space in the middle—how you arrived at it, and what it represents.
The blank space in the middle was almost not an intentional solution. I felt the overall package needed a timelessness to feel intriguing, and powerful but also elegant. The temptation with a book like this is to make a bold countercultural statement, to rely on protest graphics, etc., to give it an outsider attitude, which would be a completely valid approach and is certainly something I explored early on. But I also felt strongly that I wanted to play up to the alignment [of] Ta-Nehisi Coates in the lineage of socio-political [authors] such as Toni Morrison, Noam Chomsky, and James Baldwin. With that in mind, I wanted to convey clarity and authority. I felt the title and author name in themselves did a lot of that work for me.

How did you choose the type treatment?
The typeface I used was Grobek; this arose partly [because] it’s not a type aesthetic I have used previously (sometimes, there’s no better reason than that) but also this goes back to my decision to shy away from protest graphics in this design route. I decided to do the opposite, something elegant and light with a slightly unconventional serif. Somehow I found that through not being shouty, this stood out more, possibly due the sheer mass of negative space on the cover, which is echoed with a lighter typeface with huge counters.

How about the color bands?
The color bands frame the type elements, anchoring them to the top and bottom of the jacket. They are simply a reference to the three strands of the journey undertaken by the author, referencing Senegal, Palestine, and the U.S. But they also serve a purpose in harking back to Midcentury book cover design, further signaling the literary lineage I wanted to emphasize for Ta-Nehisi.

Is it difficult to make a cover this restrained yet effective?
I guess it can be sometimes difficult to get a cover this restraint approved. I think as long as it’s been well-designed, restraint is an admirable trait in designers (if appropriate!). But I had great supporters straight away for this cover in my art director, Richard Bravery, and the publisher for the title, Simon Prosser. It was one of those occasions where there was pretty much consensus straight away that was the strongest route—let’s just go with it!

Is there any added pressure when designing a book for such an important voice as Coates?
There is always some pressure for whoever you are designing for; you are trying to visually communicate the essence of another artist’s work in a different medium. But working for Penguin and Hamish Hamilton means that you get to work on covers for some of the most seminal figures in literature, so the excitement of that far outweighs the pressure. (Unless I’m on like round 80 and everything I’m doing still looks shit.)

Cover design by Matt Dorfman

The post 22 of the Best Book Covers of the Month: November 2024 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

We’ll bet our December guest needs no introduction. Designer, lettering artist, bestselling author, and retail shop owner Jessica Hische will join Steven Heller and Debbie Millman at the next PRINT Book Club. The always-generous Hische will discuss life, craft, and her newest book, My First Book of Fancy Letters.

A bit from the publisher:

“From the New York Times best-selling creator of Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave comes a delightful spin on the traditional alphabet book, featuring creatively hand-lettered words from A to Z and an affirming message for young readers.

Did you know letters can be ATHLETIC, BUBBLY, or even CREEPY?

Using unique lettering styles to showcase a fun word for each letter of the alphabet, this inventive picture book by creator Jessica Hische highlights how letters can come in all shapes and sizes—and are awesome in their own ways.“

Ellen Shapiro sat down with Hische recently to discuss My First Book of Fancy Letters. Read the interview here.

Don’t miss our conversation with Jessica Hische on Tuesday, December 10 at 4 PM ET. Register for the live discussion and buy your copy of My First Book of Fancy Letters. (Psst. It makes a great gift!)

The post “J is for Jessica” Hische Talks Fancy Letters at our December PRINT Book Club appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Released earlier this month, the gorgeous photo book continues themes Cohen has already mined for years through Advanced Style, in regards to aging with vitality and how important love and connection are at any point in one’s life. As a lifelong animal lover, Cohen wanted to show how pets bring an added dimension of joy and beauty to his vivacious subjects’ worlds.

When I interviewed Cohen for PRINT two years ago, he mentioned Advanced Pets was in the works, and since then I’ve been eager to connect with Cohen again upon its completion. My conversation with the always generous Cohen about Advanced Pets is transcribed below.

(Lightly edited for clarity and length.)

Where did your idea for Advanced Pets originate? 

The common theme throughout my work is love and connection. Whether it’s personal expression which creates connection with other people, or, like in my last book, actual relationships between people, that kind of connection is key to growing older with vitality. I’ve been examining different ways that people stay vital throughout their lives. 

I’ve also loved animals my whole life; I’m a vegan and have had dogs since I was a little boy, so I thought it would be interesting to explore the relationships between the women that I photograph and their own animal companions. Then, because of COVID, I noticed that people got even closer to their animals, and I thought it would be a great time to really explore that. Also, as you get older, oftentimes, unfortunately, a lot of your friends aren’t around anymore, so pets and animals become your companions, company, friends, and family, especially when you’re in isolation.

Can you share more about your love of animals, the dogs you grew up with, your current dog, Vinnie, and how those connections helped fuel this book?

Dogs have been hugely important in my life— animals of all kinds have been, but mostly dogs. I’ve always liked to express myself differently than other people and dress up, and I gravitated toward things that maybe other kids didn’t (antiques, old music); I just always felt a little different. I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up, and I couldn’t wait to come home to the dogs in my life who were my friends, comforted me, and provided fun and joy. 

Throughout our lives, oftentimes people have difficulties connecting with other people or feeling seen or understood. In talking to the ladies and just in my own experience, my dogs have always understood and accepted me without judgment, and I think that’s a very special relationship to have, where it’s just pure love; I see that with the people I featured in this book, too. My dog, Vinnie, is my best friend, and I’ve noticed that same thing with the women that I photograph; how close these relationships are, and how they’re like our family members. They teach us so much about patience and care and provide so much at the same time. 

So much of what you’re saying resonates with me. I’m a single woman who has a lot of close friends, close relationships, and love in my life, but there’s nothing quite like the relationship I have with my cat, Joan Cusack. I’ve had her as long as I’ve lived in LA, about eight years, so she’s this embodiment of my life in LA, in a way, too. It’s hard to put into words. 

Exactly! It is hard to put into words! 

That’s why I think looking to the medium of photography, as you have, is the only way to come close to capturing that connection. 

Our pets are the closest things we have to us. These relationships are so intimate, in terms of the time we spend with them. Some of the ladies say that their pets see them in all their different stages, like as they’re trying on different outfits. Our pets see us in all these different ways that are so different from how other humans see us. 

Our pets see us in all these different ways that are so different from how other humans see us. 

Pets are (seemingly) incapable of judgment, and they see us so clearly in ways that a lot of humans can’t. I think that’s so special, especially for people like the women you’re photographing, who are so distinct and opinionated and unapologetically themselves. Animals, in particular, can accept those qualities in ways that maybe some of the greater public has a mental block about. 

The ladies are sort of outsiders, in a way, because of how they dress. Especially years ago. In their time and even now, they really were rebellious in the way that they were presenting themselves. 

On the photography side of things, how did you go about conceptualizing the photoshoots for the book? What was that process and experience like, especially working with animals as your subjects? 

My work is always a mix of street style and shoots that I do on location in people’s personal spaces or near their homes. For these photos, it was really about spending time to feel the connection between each animal and their person, and then also making space for the animal to be comfortable. 

Each one was very different. It was very similar to my process for making my last book, Advanced Love because I didn’t want to force a specific type of interaction or connection. Also, the animals obviously act differently when I’m there versus when I’m not there. It was always just about trying to capture a moment and love between a person and their pet.

When I was in Florida on a ranch with Sandra and Lucy, for example, cows don’t sit still, so it was a lot of walking around the ranch. Eventually, Lucy sat down, and then Sandra sat down next to her and she started singing to her. In that moment I was able to get my photo.

What about the fashion and styling side of things for the photoshoots? 

I told people to dress their most festive and to really celebrate advanced style. 

Your Advanced Style photos have always been so visually rich, due to the styling of these women and their energy and attitudes. Can you speak to the aesthetic power of pets, and how adding that dimension to your photos elevated them even further?  

When someone is holding their animal, all dressed up, it’s almost like they become a part of them. And through that, their pet becomes a part of what they’re trying to communicate visually. 

I’ve always loved photographs of people and their pets. I have this book called Elegance by the Seeberger brothers who were shooting socialites and rich people on the streets in the 1920s and 30s, and I loved seeing the women all dressed up in their vintage clothing with their dogs. There was this one photo of a woman dressed up in polka dots with her Dalmatian, and that was sort of an inspiration for me. 

There’s a picture of a woman named Rory and her dog Elsa in the book, and they have this connection that is a soul connection. She’s this very fashionable woman in New York and carrying her dog becomes part of the way she’s presenting herself to the world. These women are so visual, so their dogs are part of that. 

Of all of the women and their pets you photographed, is there one photo or pair that you think best encapsulates the Advanced Pets project? 

There are several, but Linda and Lil Buddy embody this project. Linda’s a very dear friend of mine who lives on an island in the northwest, and in spending time with her and Lil Buddy, I saw how their relationship is very similar to how I feel about animals.

I remember being in her garden, and she was holding Lil Buddy with the sun shining down in her arms, and she was just in complete bliss in her garden holding her baby. That was a very special moment of seeing that intimate connection, where the joy was emanating from them and I was able to capture it. That was the embodiment of the project for me. 

Usually I’m just establishing relationships with humans, but now I have all these new animal friends to be connected to.

What has been the most rewarding part of the Advanced Pet process?

It was great to not only get to know new women but also, these animals. Usually, I’m just establishing relationships with humans, but now I have all these new animal friends to be connected to.

In my last book, I was showing that you can find love at any age, and this book is also showing that. My friend Jackie in the book, is in her 70s and was never a dog person until she met Betty, who has brought so much more dimension to her life that she never even knew was possible. I think that’s also a special theme of this project: the possibility that you can have love and connection at any age. 

Header image: Valerie von Sobel

The post Ari Seth Cohen’s New Book Explores Aging with Vitality and Our Pets appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The Washington Post notes that Cuban sci-fi authors are reminiscent of the “satire of Rabelais and Swift.” With that in mind, I asked Rodriguez to reflect on sci-fi as a tool of dissent.

What exactly does this niche of fiction mean?
Some of these stories reflect on what is happening in Cuban culture and politics under the cover of science fiction. It gives writers a way to be social critics in an indirect manner. They can tell stories about corruption, migration, shortages and other social ills in a dystopian setting that is not directly tied to Cuba.

Are the books produced in Cuba for Cuban readers?
The books are written in Cuba by Cuban writers but have mostly been published in Spain. Some of them have been published in Cuba; it just depends on the nature of the writing. The books by the author Yoss are not printed on the island, though they do make their way back to readers there.

Are the writers dissidents?
I don’t think they are dissidents per se, but some have been looked at in a negative light by the establishment. This is why some of their books are often published overseas. I believe that the writer Agustín de Rojas was embraced by Cuban institutions while the writer Yoss was not.

What do you feel is a smart sci-fi scenario? And is there a Cuban narrative?
My favorite thing about these stories is seeing the references to Cuban culture, the conversation style and scenarios which mirror what is happening in the Cuban society. A Cuban narrative is when all goes to hell and the characters are desperately trying to right the ship, whether it be a boat, a country or a spaceship.

How many covers have you designed, and do you expect any more to come your way?
I’ve created seven book covers over the years so there may be more in the works. My latest for Restless Books is a cover for the The Third Temple, a dystopian novel based in a futuristic Jerusalem by author Yishai Sarid.

The post The Daily Heller: Cuban Sci-Fi and Hope for the Future appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

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Felipe Goes is a graphic designer, journalist, and creative director whose work centers around the development of creative concepts and strategies for various design communication systems. Goes collaborates with clients to pave a new road for content creation that pushes the boundaries of multimedia journalism and reimagines existing work with a personalized twist. With a master’s degree in Graphic Design and Editorial Projects from Universidade do Porto, Goes has worked as a design educator since 2013.

Goes’ work on Alucinação earned him third place in the Books Entire Package category of The 2024 PRINT Awards. Alucinação is a poem written by Samuel Maciel Martins and was curated and edited by Rodrigo Marques. The book retains dense and precise language to capture the poetry found within the everyday experiences of Brazil’s young black residents.

The book, printed solely in black, boasts a relatively uncomplicated visual design at first glance but portrays a complex and intentional visual narrative that not only catches but maintains the audience’s attention. The book’s dust jacket is littered with a collection of abstract fluorescent shapes that contrast with its minimalist nature and play off of the text’s carefully calculated mathematical relationship, creating a geometric yet fluid dynamic. The stitching serves as a graphical element that connects with the title of the work and maintains cohesiveness throughout the piece.

The various choices made throughout this project stem from a focus on visual aesthetics, meticulous attention to detail, and the essential visual traditions necessary for the creation of a final tangible product that exudes care and imaginative fervor.

The post Felipe Goes’ Thoughtful & Complex Book Design for ‘Alucinação’ appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Our obsession with celebrating book and cover design finds good company—AIGA has just announced its 50 best book covers and 50 best book designs of 2023.

Just because we’re hurtling through the last quarter of 2024 doesn’t mean we can’t take a moment to reflect on these stellar book and cover designs from last year. AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers of 2023 marks the 100th year of the competition, with 542 book and cover designs entered from 28 countries. All Eligible entries had to have been published and used in the marketplace in 2023.

One hundred years into this competition, the book seems to be as protean and chimeric as ever.

Rob Giampietro, AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers Chair

“At times confounded and delighted, we asked ourselves [during the judging process], Is this a course packet or a manifesto? A sculpture or a monograph? A glossary or a guidebook? Is this book contemporary or retro? Gauche or chic?” Rob Giampietro, chair of the competition, said of their consideration process. “We debated books that blended the grotesque with the goofy alongside books that were delicate, subtle, and difficult to emotionally classify. In the end, we felt we found some of the best of this year’s offerings, books that in every case seem to show what design can do to bring the experience of reading to riskier-yet-more-rewarding places.”

Each of the 2023 winners can be viewed through AIGA’s online gallery, and will become part of the AIGA collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University’s Butler Library in New York. Entries for 50 Books | 50 Covers of 2024 can be submitted starting this November.

The post AIGA Looks Back on the 50 Best Book and Book Cover Designs of 2023 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

There’s little else in America as inherently nostalgic as a bowling alley. From those ‘90s kids such as myself who grew up attending duckpin bowling birthday parties at kitschy spots in suburban strip malls to those who remember high school dates spent at the local lanes, to grow up in the States is to have a heartfelt reverence for the institution of the bowling alley.

The signature style and aesthetic of bowling alley architecture is central to their mystique, which originally developed in mid-century California after World War II, in an effort to get more people going to the lanes. Suffice it to say, the strategy worked, with bowling alleys blooming nationwide. The history of this bowling alley boom is beautifully preserved and articulated in a new book from Angel City Press of the Los Angeles Public Library, Bowlarama: The Architecture of Mid-Century Bowling.

Written by the LA preservationist and senior editor at Los Angeles Magazine, Chris Nichols, along with historian, advocate, and former president of the Museum of Neon Art, Adriene Biondo, Bowlarama encapsulates the enthusiasm and splendor surrounding mid-century bowling alley culture through vintage photographs, ephemera, and hand-drawn architectural renderings.

An architectural style called Googie architecture was the dominant look of this era of bowling alley design, which is characterized by space-age shapes, materials, signage, and more, meant to catch the eye and entice onlookers. Last year, I took a tour of relics of Googie architecture that remain in Los Angeles with Nichols himself as the charismatic tour guide. Considering the grip Googie had on LA in the 50s and 60s, it’s no surprise the city served as the epicenter for the mid-century bowling alley frenzy portrayed in Bowlarama.

For gamers and architecture buffs alike, Bowlarama is an at-home library must-have. So many bowling lane structures are no longer with us following the crash of the craze in 1962; Bowlarama is a critical historical record that helps keep them alive.

Hero image above: The gloriously googie Covina Bowl (1956, Powers, Daly & DeRosa), shortly after it was completed in 1956, was an instant landmark in the new suburbs. (Photo credit: Charles Phoenix)

The post A New Book Honors the Bygone Bowling Alley appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Official description:
The wonders and chaos of AI converge in a powerful and thrilling novel about rewriting history, identity, love, and what it means to be human.

Graham Gooding is a leader at a tech startup when his brilliant coworker—and work crush—Nessie Locke asks for help testing a new algorithm. Graham jumps at the chance to impress her and to improve his floundering personal life. He soon discovers that the algo is more powerful than Nessie—or anyone—realizes. It was built to detect lies on the internet, but when Graham makes a small edit to Nessie’s online profile, hoping to see if the program will catch the lie, Nessie changes in real life. The algo can alter the real world. Now, so can Graham.

No one knows what Graham has done, except his boss, enigmatic tech guru David Warwick. Graham is racked with guilt, but Warwick thrills to the possibilities of what they can do next. This promises to be the innovation that will make Warwick a household name. Drawn by the power of the algo but terrified by its potential for chaos, Graham must decide what to do and whom to trust in a world where one true reality no longer exists.

As love, trust, memories and what it means to be human begin to slip away, Graham and Nessie work together to restore the past—before it’s lost to the anarchy of a world without truth.

What was the brief for this project? 
The brief called for a design that reflects the emotional core of the story while subtly hinting at the AI component—perhaps by depicting something that is altered or disappearing.

How did you arrive at the final design, and what’s going on within it?
We had been working with the idea of clouds from the beginning, but when art director Tree Abraham suggested a mirror, I immediately knew what she was trying to get at—the digitally altered self, and our reflection being distorted in ways we can’t detect. The pink bleeding inside and outside symbolizes the blurring line between the real and the artificial, seeping into one another. The sky evokes a sense of liminal space and hints at the limits of human understanding—or perhaps the boundlessness of AI. We worked on the pixelation quite a bit, making sure the pixels were distinct to avoid the image appearing blurry.

Where did you source the cloud background? 
In the story, oil paintings are used as training data for the algorithm. I loved the contrast between the hand-painted (human) sky and the distorted (artificial) reflection. Ironically, the “painting” on the cover is a digital rendering of an oil painting.

How did you select the type treatment?
We experimented with several pixelated font variations, but they felt too complex and hard to render effectively. This typeface strikes a balance: hard edges that hint at something futuristic, while its soft curves keep it readable.

What other comps did you explore before arriving at the final design? 
I initially explored imagery based on one of the main character’s tattoos, which include an olive tree, an owl in flight, a snake, a woman in armor, and a single cloud with a shaft of light. In the story, these tattoos disappear in the real world as they are erased inside the algorithm, and they recur throughout the narrative. However, these images ultimately felt too specific. We also explored glitching skylines and imagery representing human knowledge.

What overall mood were you hoping to strike in the final cover? 
I wanted to convey the feeling of being trapped in an artificial world, but with a glimmer of hope for escape—something that feels increasingly relevant today (!).

The post 17 of the Best Book Covers of the Month: September 2024 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(Side note: I did not (NOT) name myself after Oliver Jeffers. Or at least, not consciously.)

Many years ago, when my children were but wee bairns, the hours between 6 am and 6 pm were lawless, uncontrolled, anarchistic mayhem. There were four of them and only one of me, and they were all very young at the same time having all been born within three and a half years of each other, and anyone who’s ever had kids will have some idea of what this was like. Anyone who hasn’t… well… may you forever remain in ignorant bliss.

At 6 pm every day I got all four kids upstairs and into the bath, and from then on it was all soap and bubbles and running up and down the hallway playing superheroes to get dry, and then finally the best time of day when my baby-anarchists turned into four exhausted, sweet-smelling lambs, curled up under the covers, waiting for their bedtime stories.

I say stories (plural) because we’d usually get through four or five books a night. In those days, kid’s picture books were pretty much almost all I read, so they needed to be good ones. This was how we found Oliver Jeffers.

Oliver’s first book, How to Catch a Star, came out a few months before my first son was born, so there was never a time in my children’s life when there wasn’t an Oliver Jeffers book lying somewhere around the house. Between 2005 and 2015, when I reluctantly had to admit my children had outgrown picture books, we bought every book he published.

Disappearing into the magical, whimsical dream world of his illustrations every evening was our escape. As a family, we were going through a lot of changes, and many of them were very painful for my kids. If I could have waved a magic wand and made it all go away I would have, but I couldn’t. We weren’t living in that sort of story.

Luckily, Oliver Jeffers didn’t write those kinds of stories either. The characters in his books experienced fear, loss, and hopelessness, but it was their sense of curiosity and adventure that drove them forward, and it was always through some sort of collaborative teamwork that they managed to make it through. Whether it was helping a lost penguin, rescuing a stranded martian, releasing a bottled-up heart, indulging a passion for paper airplanes, or learning to read books rather than eat them, each story was a subtle reminder that the best way forward was to ask for help, trust in the power of friendship, and accept the small acts of kindness offered by those around you.

Book illustrations by Oliver Jeffers; featured with the artist’s permission

When I was writing Frighten the Horses I occasionally daydreamed about what it would be like if someone actually published my story. Given that I had no formal education in creative writing, no MFA, and no contacts in the publishing industry, this seemed like an elaborate dream, but while I was elaborately dreaming, why not go all the way? Someone once told me it would help during the long years of writing and re-writing to have a picture of the final product in mind, and so my final product naturally had a cover illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.

Someone once told me it would help during the long years of writing and re-writing to have a picture of the final product in mind, and so my final product naturally had a cover illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.

After the first part of my dream had come true—when the book had been acquired by Grove, edited by Roxane Gay, and had moved into production—I got an email from Roxane asking me if I had any thoughts about the cover. I assumed this was a formality since I’d been told with good authority that the author usually doesn’t get much say in the matter, particularly if he’s an unknown writer and the book is a debut. But I figured since she’d asked, I might as well give her an honest answer, however embarrassingly self-indulgent it might seem. When I didn’t hear anything back, I assumed the art department was going to ignore my suggestion and just produce whatever they wanted, which was fine by me since I was pretty sure the team at Grove knew what they were doing.

About a month later, I got an email update from Roxane, in which she casually mentioned that she’d “contracted Oliver Jeffers” for the cover.

For a moment I couldn’t work out whether the “r” in that word was a typo. Had she contacted Oliver Jeffers, or contracted him? Tentatively I reached out and asked. When she told me it was the latter, I nearly fell off my chair.

It turned out that Roxane knew Oliver. When she asked him if he’d be interested in doing the cover, Oliver politely declined, saying he was too busy with his own work to take on anything for anybody else. Roxane suggested he at least read the book before making a decision. Oliver continued to resist, putting it off like it was “forgotten homework,” until on a delayed international flight he reluctantly pulled it out of his bag. “Before the seatbelt sign had been switched off,” he wrote to me afterward, “I was hooked.”

I’m not going to repeat the rest of what he said because I’m bashful and it’s private, but I will share that he finished by saying, “Many, many things may have changed for you, but one thing is clear: you’ve always been a writer.”

Reader, I wept.

If you had told me when I first started falling in love with Oliver’s illustrations twenty years ago that I would have ended up with a cover as gorgeous as this, I would never have believed you. The minute he sent it through I emailed it to my best friend, and when she called me back moments later, all we could do was laugh. Really, it seemed like the only sane response to how utterly, preposterously perfect it was: just to laugh and laugh and laugh. The horse hoofs, the motorbike, the trans colors, the Louboutin shoe! Who could pick up this book and not want to know what the hell was going on inside its pages? What other picture could so accurately and engagingly introduce the story of my life?

Which leads us to why I think this story has such an Oliver Jeffers ending. His books don’t have morals, but they do have messages, and if there’s anything I’ve learned while working towards the publication of Frighten the Horses, it’s to overcome my fear of asking people for favors. Creating a book is an intensely collaborative process, and I’ve been frankly astonished by how many people have been willing to get involved or offer help when asked.

It’s also the message of the memoir itself. My children and I would never have made it through without leaning on the people who were there for us when we needed them, and without accepting help from all the therapists, support centers, peer groups, and resources that queer people have worked so hard to build so that people like us would have somewhere to turn. We couldn’t have done it alone, and I’m very glad we didn’t have to.

What I’ve come to believe through it all is that the most valuable human trait is kindness, which is something I may have first started to learn all those years ago, tucked up under the covers with my children, reading Oliver Jeffers books.

Oliver Radclyffe is part of the new wave of transgender writers unafraid to address the complex nuances of transition, examining the places where gender identity, sexual orientation, feminist allegiance, social class, and family history overlap. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and Them. His monograph, Adult Human Male, was published by Unbound Edition in 2023. His memoir, Frighten the Horses is out now with Roxane Gay Books.

Listen to Debbie Millman’s conversation with Oliver Jeffers on Design Matters.

The post My Book Cover Has Its Own Story appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Below, Mendelsund tells us more about this metamorphosis.

My sundry copies of Kafka over the years had various cover designs by different artists. What was the inspiration for developing a unified stylistic scheme? And is your format the current standard?
Kafka has been packaged in any number of ways down the years. Generally speaking, other designs I’ve seen tend to fall back on particular well-worn Kafka visual tropes, specially: images of a lone man pitted against a faceless bureaucracy, or ground under the wheel of some other fascist/totalitarian entity. Or just nods towards generic, early 20th-century expressionism. It’s always the symbology of contemporary anxiety—nefarious, crooked or otherwise askew, frightening, disorienting. These designs reflect particular readings of Kafka’s work.

What was your influence for this decidedly unique approach?
Simply put, the readings of Kafka I mentioned above are not … wrong … they just don’t capture the whole picture. They ignore the humor and humanism in Kafka’s work. I never read Kafka’s books and imagine, say, a dark palette. I always think of bright color. His books can be bleak and, sure, frightening. But his style is so surreal, whimsical, gnomic and often outright funny (I always think about how, in The Trial—one of his most obvious apologues for the powerlessness of 20th-century man in the face of new systems of control and governance—there is a scene in which the protagonist meets a woman, Leni, who has webbed hands. “What a delightful paw!” he says of her.) That is to say, I didn’t want Kafka to seem overly bleak or off-putting to potential readers. Especially first-time readers. Incidentally, there is an account of Kafka giving a reading of his work to his friends, and being so doubled over with laughter at his own words he could barely go on. So, color. Whimsy. And designs that are highly stylized, to match his allegorical preoccupations.

The eyes are the common (or iconic) visual element. What made you seize on them?
I’ve always loved books that look back at you (don’t all books look back at you one way or another?). The eyes all began with The Trial, and the image that came to me of a wall of scrutiny. A jury, or panel or synod. That cover came first. The rest followed pretty naturally from there. 

It’s funny, those specific eyes of mine (there is a long history of stylized eyes, from the hieratic ancient Egyptian eyes to Paul Rand’s) have now become a commonly used design element. I have no understanding as to why. But I see these eyes all the time now. I saw them in a poster in the background of a new movie, I saw them advertised as a “Bauhaus” poster on Instagram, but especially in contemporary book design: I saw two new novels in the window of McNally Jackson this month that use them on the cover. Not just any eyes, but the exact proportions of mine, as if traced. It’s strange. My eyes served a very particular function. I don’t quite understand how they’ve become so modular. Except that editors do tend to ask designers to make something that resembles something else that worked in the marketplace.

Typographically, the informal script ties the covers together.
The script is a typeface based on Kafka’s handwriting, designed by the brilliant Julia Bausenhardt. Seemed the most apt face to use. 

Did you plan out the series all at once, or did you allow each added title to organically come together?
The editor-in-chief at Pantheon at the time (the late, great Dan Frank) and one of the world’s foremost editors and translators of the time (the late, great Carol Janeway) approached me independently (but simultaneously) about taking this on. Redesigning all of Kafka. It was my second day as art director of Pantheon books. Dan and I initially conceived of these as hardcovers, though it ended up being too expensive a proposition, so they ended up as paperbacks. Which is sad, because my initial conception of the books was to have them be printed in two different heights, alternating, so when lined up on a shelf they would be crenellated, like a castle; like Kafka’s Castle. A place that one approaches, but never truly arrives at. When I used to design, I always tried to find ways to justify the use of any medium or surface I had to design to. I never really loved just slapping a design on a surface. So, the idea of making something metaphoric out of this collection of objects (books) felt important. Alas.

Are there more to come?
I’m not sure! I kind of doubt it. At least until new translations pop up.

When I look at them together, I have the desire to read Kafka all over again. Was this the intent? Or just a natural consequence of doing such a successful “brand”?
This was most definitely the intent! I wanted to say to readers: “Read Kafka, re-read Kafka, re-examine Kafka; but have fun.” I don’t think it hurts though that the designs speak so well to one another.

The post The Daily Heller: All Eyes Are on Kafka appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Letterform Archive in San Francisco is currently showing a retrospective of Kennedy’s work in an exhibition entitled Citizen Printer, curated by Kelly Walters. On view through January, the show features over 150 type-driven artifacts created by Kennedy throughout his career and is accompanied by a monograph of the same name. This book has been selected for our September PRINT Book Club, which will feature a virtual conversation with Kennedy moderated by Steven Heller and Debbie Millman on Thursday, September 19, at 4 p.m. ET. Learn more and register to attend here!

As a primer to the Book Club, check out my conversation with Kennedy about his background and the exhibition below! (Conversation lightly edited for length and clarity.)

What first brought you to printmaking?

I didn’t enter into letterpress printing until about 1988, and prior to that, I’d worked in corporate America as a computer programmer. I discovered it in Williamsburg, Virginia. Williamsburg is a historical village based upon the 18th-century colonies, and they had an 18th-century print shop. I saw the docent doing a demonstration of letterpress printing, and then I just started doing it. I’ve been doing it ever since!

Before that, I had dabbled in calligraphy for a number of years, so I had a background in letters and letter forms. But for some reason, letterpress printing really resonated with me. I also had very minor experience in commercial printing at the university that I went to; my neighbor was the university printer, so occasionally, I would pop into his shop while he was working, and he would explain some of the rudimentary principles of printing, but I didn’t actively pursue it.

After you discovered letterpress printing in Williamsburg, how did you start printing yourself?

I was staying in Chicago at the time. There was an organization called Artist Book Works, a community-based book arts program that taught letterpress printing, bookbinding, paper decorations, and things of that nature. I took two of their letterpress courses, and then I was on my own.

I continued to work in corporate America, and then I was forced out by the downsizing of the company. I tried to set up a print shop at home in my basement, but I was very unsuccessful at it. So then, like any good person, when you don’t know what you’re doing, you go hide out in graduate school. So I did that. I got my MFA in graphic design from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

I had my own letterpress shop, even when I was in graduate school— I had it long before I went to graduate school. That’s one of the things that distinguished me from other students; they were using the equipment that was at the university, so once they left, they had to find equipment to use. But I already had my equipment—I had a Vandercook 4 and a Heidelberg 10×15 Platen—and so once I left, I could continue to pursue learning the skills and learning the craft. 

How did you acquire those two presses? 

When I started, the zenith of letterpress printing had waned, and offset printing had taken over, so people were getting rid of this equipment. But a school had one, and no printer wanted it, so they just offered it for free. I saw the notice, and then I went and picked it up. I paid about $5,000 for the Heidelberg from another printer, which was an exorbitant price at that time.

Do you still have them?

I have the Heidelberg, but I gave the 4 to a community print shop, and I have no idea what happened to it. 

What was the turning point that allowed you to go from your unsuccessful print shop in your basement to the successful artist you are now?

A complete abandonment of any goals. I just gave up and started printing because I liked printing and needed a modest income to support myself.  Everything else has been the result of me doing those two things: getting up every day and printing and enjoying it. I also tried to become an academic, but I found that to be too stressful and too confining.

How did you develop your signature printmaking style? When did that distinct aesthetic coalesce for you as an artist?

Well, to begin with, I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a printer … kinda. I don’t even consider myself a printer; I consider myself a person with a printing press. Printers are very professional, careful, and sincere about what they do, and I just mess around. I have fun. And I’m fortunate that people see the merit in what I do and want to hire me and buy the things I make.

I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a printer … kinda. I don’t even consider myself a printer; I consider myself a person with a printing press.

I was formally trained in what they call fine printing and book arts, but when I moved to Alabama, I transitioned to what I’m doing now. The reason I do what I do is out of necessity. I had a commission that I was working on, and I made a mistake, but I didn’t have any more paper, and I didn’t have money to buy it, so I had to do something with what I had. I decided to carefully print another layer over everything so you couldn’t see the mistake and put the corrected text on top. After I did that, I found it interesting how the letters overlapped in the shapes that were made, so I continued doing that. It became one of the styles that people recognize me for. 

Your activism is a central part of your printmaking practice, and you use your printmaking as a form of abolition. Where does your drive to communicate those ideas and themes in your work come from? 

It comes from my humanity. It is a part of the universal humanity in all of us: the humanity that cries out for justice, the humanity that cries out for liberation. We all have that within us. It is what makes us human.

I’ve always been that way. How do I separate my skin from the rest of my body? It’s just the nature of the beast that I am. I was raised in a family that, foremost, was truth, respect for individuals no matter what their so-called social class was, you do not infringe upon another person’s rights, and you show generosity and gratitude at all times.

Can you tell me a bit about your exhibition at Letterform Archive, Citizen Printer?

The exhibition includes works from as early as 1988, so it’s not just posters. It shows the artist books I’ve done and the wider swath of my work. It’s a retrospective, and that’s the first time this has ever been done. All of the exhibitions I’ve done to date have been site-specific, in that if an organization or a university or a museum asks me to do an exhibition, I will do it, provided that they identify grassroots organizations that need to have their message disseminated. I will then create promotional materials for those grassroots organizations to be exhibited as posters in the museum. Then after the exhibition is over, the museum gives those materials to the organizations to use as they see fit. 

I tell them, If you want me, then you have to do something for the community. And I don’t mean the United Way or the NAACP. I mean, grassroots organizations and small organizations that may not even have a 501(c)(3), but they’re out there helping their community.

The reason I do that is that traditionally, museums have excluded Black people, but now, they want Black people, brown people, those populations that they did not actively recruit in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, to come and take advantage of the services and the offerings of the museum. But when you’ve told somebody for 40 years that they can’t come in, you can’t just stay, “The door is open! Please come in!” You have to actively go and get them. 

So I tell the museums that that’s what this is about. It’s about them going to the community and saying, “We value what you do. We value your words. And we hope that you have a degree of trust with us, and you’ll come and visit us and utilize the services that we have here.”

It’s commendable that you’re using these opportunities to exhibit your work to uplift others. 

That’s basically the way that I do things. When I work with organizations or museums, it’s about expanding the audience of that institution and bringing in new people to experience the services that that institution has.

The post Letterpress Printer Amos Kennedy Jr. Makes Art As Statement appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

As a lover of all manner of bars, pubs, dives, speakeasies, and cocktail lounges, I was eager to learn more about this latest endeavor from the Murrays and get my hands on my own copy. The pair’s responses to my questions about Great Bars of New York City are below.

Why bars? What is it about bars that you find so compelling and reflective of NYC culture and history?

We chose to publish a book highlighting New York City bars as we consider them to be the heart of New York City’s culture and neighborhoods. Historically, bars have always been melting pots and places where people from all backgrounds and cultures can mingle and share stories while enjoying a drink, and where relationships often start. For many New York residents, their neighborhood bar serves as a home away from home, where people can choose to be alone together. 

For many New York residents, their neighborhood bar serves as a home away from home, where people can choose to be alone together. 

We also feel the need to document these special places, similar to our work featured in our previous book, Store Front NYC: Photographs of the City’s Independent Shops, Past and Present, as many beloved bars have been forced to close in recent years due to economic pressures and rapidly changing neighborhood demographics.

You’re known best for your exterior photographs of storefronts. How is documenting interiors different when it comes to capturing tone, mood, and telling a story?

We approached our interior photography of the bars with the goal of capturing the essence of each location as well as including often overlooked details, especially ones that even regular visitors may have missed. We included an establishing photograph, often showing the overview of the space as you would walk through the door, and also photographed areas where patrons would spend most of their time while drinking, either at the bar itself or at a specific booth or table.

We photographed each bar using only available light, not bringing any additional equipment inside so that our photos would mirror the way the bar would appear during a typical visit.

What sorts of details typically capture your photographic eye?

We always seek out interesting architectural details, including handcrafted woodwork such as the mahogany balcony with its quatrefoil design inside The Campbell, the stained glass windows and back bar insets made by Tiffany at Peter McManus Cafe, and even the shoulder-height porcelain urinals in the men’s bathroom at Old Town Bar and Restaurant.

We also focused our lens on many of the items hanging on the walls and from the ceiling of the bars as they also provide insight into the bar’s history, including the turkey wishbones hanging at McSorley’s Old Ale House and the old saloon licenses at Fanelli Cafe.

How did you approach curating the 30 bars included in the book? What was your selection process?

In choosing which bars to include in our publication, we decided to concentrate on only the borough of Manhattan and focused on historic establishments, former speakeasies that sold illegal alcoholic beverages during the Prohibition era, as well as bars immortalized in film and literature. 

We additionally featured many lesser-known spots and dive bars including Rudy’s Bar & Grill, one of the city’s last affordable “working man” bars. Of course, there were numerous noteworthy locations we would have loved to include, but those will have to wait for another book!

Of the 30 bars cataloged in the book, do you have a favorite?

It’s so difficult to pick a favorite, but Pete’s Tavern holds a special place in our hearts as it not only has a beautiful historic interior, but also a welcoming staff and great food and drink. We try to stop by as often as possible and especially love visiting at Christmastime when the bar is strung with hundreds of lights and decorations.

Why does creating physical books continue to be so important to you both as photographers?

Since our journey as photographers began with documenting the streets of New York City using a 35mm film camera, printing our photographs and studying them has always been important to us. We have always felt that sharing our work in book form complements the subject matter by staying “old-school,” similar to the stores and bars we have photographed, while also capturing the patina and texture of the locations.

The post James and Karla Murray Raise a Glass to NYC’s Storied Bars in New Book appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

And from the psychedelic to the straightforward to the splendidly surreal, the rest of our favorite book covers unveiled or published over the past month follow!

How did you arrive at the final design of this cover, and what’s going on within it?
Once I’d read the book, I had a clear idea in my head of what I wanted the cover to do. The novel looks closely at desire, control, sexuality and power. It’s set in the shared house of four young people in LA, with a backdrop of wildfires and looming ecological disaster. I wanted to capture these aspects—the domestic and emotional somehow set against the climate/environment. My illustrative skills are limited, so I turned to other artists [for the inset image].

What was the brief for this project?
When I received the brief for Edendale, the book had already been published in the US. The US cover focuses on the eco-horror aspect of the novel, but the UK publisher, Dead Ink, wanted to be less specific with their cover. It’s a tricky book to classify—the editor said it’s “eco-thriller meets psychodrama, with a healthy dose of creeping dread,” and after reading it, I can confirm that this is an accurate description!

Tell us a bit about that inset image.
I found a few images that I thought might work. There are some amazing paintings by Andrew Savage of smoke, windows and fire. I also found a brilliant photo of sunburned shoulders by Brea Souders. But I had one of those rare occasions where I found the ideal image for a cover, like it had been made especially for the novel. It’s an artwork by Frances Waite depicting a woman in the bath with trees ablaze in the window behind her. The despair, sexuality, wildfire and domesticity all made it perfect for Edendale.

I tried a few options, including a typographic approach and collage approach, but strongly recommended the cover with the artwork by Frances Waite. Luckily the author and publisher agreed, and Frances was very happy to have her art on the cover.

How did you select the type treatment? (And did you have to fight any battles to split the title?)
The title typeface is my attempt at Southern Californian design. I hope there is a little bit of Ed Ruscha in it, and a little bit of The Colby Poster Printing Company. 

There was a query about whether splitting the title would be a good idea. I tried some versions of a similar design without splitting it, and we all agreed that they weren’t as successful. Sometimes I think being a cover designer is 10% designing a good cover, and 90% persuading everyone else that it is good. But I really love working with Dead Ink; they have an intelligent and trusting way of working with designers, and it never feels like a fight. It’s all about trying to make a great cover that will attract readers and represent the book accurately.

How did you select the color palette?
I was spoilt for choice really. I thought a murky green might work, like the dying plants in a scorching city, or yellow to nod to both sunshine and a sense of warning. But ultimately we all agreed on the pink. I like how harmless and “millennial pink” it seems, but really in my mind it represents sunburn.

The post 25 of the Best Book Covers of the Month: August 2024 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Couple of new posts on The Book Cover Review worth a look see: Joe McLaren on The Jon Pertwee Book of Monsters and Tree Abraham on Parker Mabee’s A Wander in the Woods.

33 1/3 have announced their new batch of titles, including Andi Harriman on The Cure’s Disintegration, Yousef Srour on Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Joel Mayward on Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell. I’m amazed they’ve been going this long and still haven’t covered Swift in any way whatsoever. Love her or not, it’s a weird omission.

Excellent thread of behind the scenes shots of classic album covers. Particularly love all the Björk ones, natch.

Agnès Poirier meets the army of artisans tasked with rebuilding the Notre Dame, the 12th-century ‘soul of France’. Incredibly, it looks like they’re going to hit the target date arbitrarily thrown down by Macron the day after the fire.

The Quiet Persuader on iPlayer, a 1965 documentary following New York ad-man Stephen Frankfurt. Half an hour very well spent.

100 of the greatest posters of celebrities urging you to READ; in which James Folta bravely attempts to rank the iconic American Library Association series. The Connery one always cracks me up.

How design’s oldest org torched a decade of discourse—when AIGA Eye on Design vanished overnight, it exposed a troubling lack of stewardship in preserving our industry’s legacy. How can we ensure our design history endures in the digital age?

Do I need these decade-spanning Japanese SNOOPY COMIC SELECTION books? Why yes, yes I do.

That is all.

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header image: Unsplash+ with Michael Tucker.

The post Meanwhile No. 208 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

“It’s taught me much about myself over the years, even though I cringe at so much of what I’ve written. It helped me realise that consistently showing up without expectations often leads to more inspiration than relying on random bursts of motivation” – OMGLORD‘s Gabby Lord on the changes and challenges she’s seen over a decade of design.

Absolutely astonishing shot by Peter Iain Campbell of the Ninian Northern oil platform being decommissioned in Lerwickby Harbour, Shetland. Looks like Howl’s Moving Castle regurgitated by shonky AI, but it’s real.

See also: Jonathan Hoefler’s Life Imitates AI Art.

Anthony Burrill uses typography to visualise the work of rock’s greatest drummers, joining forces with five music legends in a unique collaboration to raise funds for Teenage Cancer Trust.

Tim Andraka’s art will break how you see the world.

MS Paint in browser is all very well, but call me when you’ve recreated Deluxe Paint IV (via relentless blog overlord J-Kott).

Slate’s spot-on review of Deadpool and Wolverine, a film I begrudgingly went to see (because I don’t like to miss an issue) but was genuinely surprised by. Soooooo much better than the first two. It’s The Madagascar 3 of Deadpool films. I just wish they hadn’t spaffed quite so much of the casting in the marketing. People were going to show up, you didn’t need to reveal that BLANK and BLANK and BLANK were involved.

In memory of Sir Kenneth Grange, 1929-2024.

That is all.

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash.

The post Meanwhile No. 209 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Grace Han crafted one of the most intriguing and enigmatic jackets in recent memory for The God of the Woods (that drip!). And it just so happens that the much-hyped book is also now a bonafide hit, with rave reviews from outlets galore and a spot on The New York Times bestseller list.

Han proves that great mainstream books can also have great covers that break staid genre norms—and this cover perhaps passes the ultimate design test: It leads you right back to the book to unravel the riddle on its surface.

She tells us more about the cover below, and the rest of our favorite jackets of the month follow.

Official publisher description:

When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide. Early morning, August 1975: A camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any 13-year-old: She’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished 14 years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

What was the brief for this book? 

The cover had to be atmospheric and mysterious, yet human. It was important for the cover to draw readers into the world that Liz Moore created. 

How did you select the type treatment? (And did you manipulate the face at all?)

I love typefaces by VJ-Type. They’re an independent foundry based in Paris. The font, Sud, designed by Jérémy Schneider, is bold and unexpected, which perfectly echoes the energy of the book. I didn’t feel the need to alter it in any way.

Who did the handwritten elements? 

I lettered those elements. Even if it’s a small detail, I love including hand-done work in my projects. 

Where did you source the painting in the background?

I was doing image research on Bridgeman and came across this painting, where I homed in on the left corner detail: a pastoral depiction of the woods with ominous-looking clouds. I felt that the art had the right human touch and atmosphere.

And finally—the drip. It’s so striking.

The drip! The drip is something readers will have to find out for themselves! As a design element, I thought it added tension and signaled that something was amiss. 

There was a lot of anticipation for this book—does that ever add extra pressure when designing?

I like to design while thinking about the audience—more specifically, someone who’d most need the book I’m working on. I think this mindset lifts some of the external pressures and helps me focus on the task at hand. It’s also not lost on me that I work with a great team. Even when there is some added pressure, it feels like a shared responsibility. I don’t feel like I’m in it alone. 

The post Best Book Covers: How the Summer’s Biggest Lit-Mystery Hit Was Designed appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Until this weekend, I had dozens of vintage 1930s–’50s paperbacks boxed up in a closet that remained untouched, and indeed forgotten. When I opened it as part of a plan to clean out my storage bins, I found many gems, including three covers that grabbed my eye and fit my genre lust to a T. I also noticed the initials “HLH” on two of them, and a lone “H” on the third. Who was it? There was no other artistic attribution, so I did some detective work of my own—and solved the mystery rather quickly.

A quick Google search revealed that the publisher Popular Library was founded in 1942 as a detective story reprint company, but soon expanded into other genres. Twenty years later, the company went public with a stock offering, and in 1967 was sold to another publisher. But most importantly, for me, Popular Library’s first 100 covers were all created by the same artists, H. Lawrence Hoffman and Sol Immerman. The art eventually became more eye-catching and vivid with the addition of illustrators Rudolph Belarski, Earle K. Bergey and Rafael DeSoto … none of whom I had heard of, though I’m certain I’ve seen their work.

The three books shown here are by Hoffman (1911–1977), a designer, illustrator, calligrapher and painter based in New York. He was prolific, with 25 publishing house clients, including Knopf, Pocket Books, Popular Library, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and Random House. He illustrated and/or designed over 600 book covers.

Hoffman graduated Rhode Island School of Design in 1934 and received what was at the time a rare post-graduate degree in commercial art. He moved to New York City, worked as an art director at the A.M. Sneider Advertising Company (1938–1941) and at Immerman Art Studios (1941–?). He freelanced for the remainder of his career and taught illustration and lettering at The Cooper Union and C.W. Post University.

Hoffman launched his career doing drawings for the pulp-genre Thrilling Mystery Magazine, a Ned Pines publication. Beginning around 1943, he began illustrating almost all of the first 100 paperback covers for Popular Library, also founded by Pines.

In 1947, Hoffman designed the jacket and interior illustrations for The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Modern English Prose Translation by R.M. Lumiansky, published by Simon & Schuster. The book was later selected as one of the 50 best books of the year by AIGA.

(Author’s note: After scanning the first page of Google results, I went to the next and found this article from 2015. When for well over a decade you do five posts a week, memory, they say, is the first thing to go …)

The post The Daily Heller: Finding a New Old Illustrator in a Closet (I Thought) appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Only 1% of global healthcare research is invested in female-specific conditions beyond cancer.

Across 770 diseases, on average, women are diagnosed four years later than men.

Less than half of medical schools have women’s health curricula.

These are just four of the 100 staggering statistics compiled within Evvy’s newly released coffee table book that sheds light on the glaring sexism embedded in American healthcare. 100 Effed Facts About the Gender Health Gap, created by Evvy as an offshoot of their Equal Research Day 2024 campaign, is a “Very Incomplete List of Ways the Female Body Has Been Left Behind by Modern Medicine.”

Evvy is a care platform for women and people with vaginas that provides at-home vaginal microbiome testing and clinical care. Its mission is to close the gender health gap by discovering and leveraging overlooked female biomarkers, starting with the vaginal microbiome. As part of this mission, Evvy launched the annual Equal Research Day on June 10 each year to promote inclusive research and raise awareness for the gender health gap.

For this year’s Equal Research Day, they expanded their campaign by creating and distributing the limited edition 100 Effed Facts About the Gender Health Gap coffee table book. 100% of the proceeds from the book are being donated to Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM) to help accelerate women’s research and funding. You can purchase the book at equalresearchday.com— though it is currently sold out, it will be restocked.

The 250-page book is striking and intentionally demands attention. It features a bright red printed softcover with a cut and foil-stamped jacket. Its significant size (8.5″ x 10.5″) takes up space and makes the interior imagery and text big, bold, and undeniable. The large circular motif on the cover features on every page of the book, symbolizing the gender health gap visually and replicating the sense of inaccessibility as it obscures imagery and text.

Evvy’s CMO, Laine Bruzek, led on the book’s creation. She answered a few of my questions below about the process, the importance of Evvy’s work, and the severity of the gender health gap.

The female body shouldn’t be a medical mystery.

At what point and why did your team decide to release a book to address the gender health gap? How is this book an extension of the work you’re already doing, and what does it provide that your other offerings don’t?

We founded Evvy because the female body shouldn’t be a medical mystery, but to this day, it is. On average, women are diagnosed four years later than men across 770+ diseases, in part because women weren’t required to be in US clinical research until June 10, 1993.

That’s why Evvy created a holiday called Equal Research Day on June 10— think Equal Pay Day but for the gender health gap. Every year, we invest in a large-scale campaign to raise money for Women’s Health Access Matters and bring awareness to the disparities in scientific and medical research. This book was published in honor of Equal Research Day 2024. 

Year-round, Evvy focuses on pioneering precision clinical care for vaginal health powered by our state-of-the-art vaginal microbiome test. But Equal Research Day is when we step back and spark conversations about the gaps in women’s health more broadly. 

What was the book development and design process like? It’s a distinct and visually compelling design, with the large circular gap motif throughout. How did that concept come about?

First, we decided to make a book because we need to be having more conversations about the gender health gap, and I believe in the power of physical artifacts to start those conversations. 

Additionally, and unfortunately, the facts about the gender health gap speak for themselves. They are powerful, angering, and motivating, so a book is merely the best way to gather those facts in one place. 

We decided to make a book because we need to be having more conversations about the gender health gap, and I believe in the power of physical artifacts to start those conversations.

Finally, we wanted to make something that could live at the center of where people are gathering— in your living room, in an office lounge, in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. All it takes is someone to open the book to get them hooked and want to talk about it. Each page is downright shocking when the facts are things like, “Women are 32% more likely to die if their surgeon is a man” or “Less than half of medical schools have women’s health curricula.”

When it comes to the design of the book, we wanted to infuse it with the sense of frustration and loss that women experience after delays in diagnoses, failed treatments, mystery symptoms with no answers, or medical gaslighting. 

We realized that putting a huge graphic hole—a literal gap—on every page achieves that. It obscures key parts of photos, covers certain letters and words, and generally leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness and loss, plus the motivation to uncover what’s behind it to fix it. That’s precisely how we hope readers will feel about the gender health gap when they’re done reading, too.

How did your team go about sourcing and curating the facts in the book?

There is no shortage of “effed” facts about women’s health— the hardest part was narrowing our book down to just 100. It was important to us to highlight gaps in healthcare across all categories—not just what typically falls under “women’s health”—so we initially had hundreds of facts across cancer, heart health, hormonal health, autoimmune disease, vaginal health, menstrual health, and beyond. 

That makes this book one of the most comprehensive compilations of gender health gap facts ever assembled. While our team did the sourcing and curation, every fact featured in our coffee table book exists because a researcher persevered to bring it to life— not an easy task when funding for women’s health is so scarce.

What is Evvy doing on the clinical research side to close the gender health gap?

Evvy is closing the gender health gap by discovering and leveraging overlooked female biomarkers, starting with the vaginal microbiome. 

Vaginal discomfort is a leading reason women seek healthcare advice (for conditions like bacterial vaginosis, yeast infections, recurrent UTIs, and more). Additionally, research has uncovered groundbreaking links between the vaginal microbiome and critical female health outcomes like infertility, STIs, preterm birth, gynecologic cancers, and more. Yet, the vaginal microbiome remains under-researched, and current standards for vaginal healthcare are underpinned by simplistic methods like microscopy and brute-force antibiotics.  

In 2021, we launched the Evvy Vaginal Health Test, the world’s first CLIA-certified, at-home vaginal microbiome test that tests for 700+ bacteria and fungi with a single swab. Evvy’s larger vaginal healthcare platform is the first to combine state-of-the-art vaginal microbiome and STI testing, precision clinical care, and coaching to give women and people with vaginas the care they deserve. Through this platform, Evvy is building real-world datasets that can transform our understanding of complex female health conditions. 

Our platform has not only provided tens of thousands of women and people with vaginas with better vaginal healthcare, but it has also built the world’s largest comprehensive dataset on the vaginal microbiome — enabling a new age of precision medicine.

Have you seen the gender health gap shrink in any way since Evvy’s inception? Is there any hope we can cling to? And inversely, what are the most critical areas where work still needs to be done?

One key way we can close the gender health gap is through innovation. Over the last few years, I have been greatly encouraged by the proliferation of brilliant founders (many of them female) tackling women’s health challenges across whole-body health, from cancer to heart health to menopause to vaginal health and beyond. 

Some of the brightest minds are working on women’s health right now as researchers, doctors, policymakers, founders, and advocates— and that should be a source of great hope. 

That said, we still have a long way to go when it comes to funding women’s health research. Only 1% of global healthcare research and innovation is invested in female-specific conditions beyond cancer— that’s just 1% for all of menopause, endometriosis, PCOS, vaginal health, and much, much more. Additionally, half as much funding goes to diseases that mainly affect women compared to those that mainly affect men. The incredible people building the future of women’s health can’t do so without the proper resources, and the funding gaps in women’s health are staggering and alarming. 

The post “100 Effed Facts About the Gender Health Gap” Lays Bare the Sexism in US Healthcare appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Official description:
Seven, who works as a cleaner at a chiropractor’s office, re-encounters Cecilia, a woman who has obsessed her since their school days. As the two of them board the same bus—each dubiously claiming not to be following the other—their chance meeting spurs a series of intensely vivid and corporeal memories. As past and present bleed together, Seven can feel her desire begin to unmoor her from the flow of time.

Smart, subversive and gripping, Cecilia is a winding, misty road trip through bodily transformation, inextricable histories of violence and love, and the ghosts of girlhood friendship.

What was the brief here? You utterly captured a vibe.
Thank you! The brief asked for something “cool, sexy and startling.” Hopefully, some of those qualities made it through.

K-Ming Chang’s previous covers for the U.S. and U.K. markets have had a mythical storybook feel. They are gorgeous and unique pieces of illustration, and I adore them. For this outing, however, the publishing team at Vintage wanted to go with something bolder and more graphic. The idea was to retain a sense of otherworldliness while playing up the author’s edgier side.

How did you arrive at the final design?
Yeti Lambregts, a brilliant designer who works at Vintage, was my main point of contact there, and she gave me direction over email. So a good proportion of the credit ought to go to her and Vintage’s creative director, Suzanne Dean.

My very first visuals were illustrative, precisely the opposite of what they requested. For some reason, I feel compelled to do everything the hard way. However, they liked the approach of merging a crow and a woman.

I was asked to provide a second round with some kind of weird, corporeal, photographic element. This resulted in a second round of visuals that were mostly deemed too gross and tonally wrong. However, in this batch, I landed on the type and image lockup that we settled on for the final cover.

My initial reticence to explore a photographic route stemmed from a ridiculous idea on my part that it was in some way “too real” for such a strange book. But photography, of course, has always had an expressive and experimental discipline, so I’m not entirely sure where this conviction came from.

At first, I wanted this strangeness to be done “in camera,” which I felt was more organic and appropriate to the book than digital processing. But finding an image that could speak so specifically to the book’s themes turned out to be impossible, so I made my own “double exposure” image using photos by Innis McAllister and Mohamad Itani (both via Millennium Images).

What’s the significance of the crow and the face?
The narrator often describes the movement of crows around her. The central element of the book is her obsession with Cecilia, a woman she first met when they were both children. To me, the book seemed concerned with impermanence, transformation, yearning, and the sense of weirdness that comes from simply existing.

There’s obviously way more to unpack here, but I don’t feel particularly qualified to do so. Like a dream, the book is suffused with a mood that is at least as important as the narrative.

It’s a bit like an optical illusion at first—I didn’t see the face until I had stared at it for a few moments. Was that the intent at all?  
Sort of. I was hoping for something that felt ambiguous but intense.

Another version of a similar idea had a woman’s eye in place of the crow’s eye. I really liked that approach, though it feels more self-consciously “smart” and lacks some of the mystery of the final cover.

The crow is definitely dominant at small sizes. At actual size, I always see the woman first. Perhaps it’s some kind of evolutionary bias (do we see human shapes first?), or because I already know to look for her. Or maybe I’m just reactively checking my compositing skills!

I like images (and art of all kinds) that don’t immediately reveal their meaning. Or where the meaning is evident but ambivalent. My father—who was an art director at Penguin back in the 1970s—introduced me to artists like Man Ray and Arcimboldo when I was very young, so I guess this stuff left some kind of impression. (I should make it clear that I’m in no way comparing my artistic ability to my dad’s, let alone Arcimboldo or Man Ray!)

How did you select the type treatment?
Almost 10 years ago, Ellmer Stefan of The Pyte Foundry released a font every week for a year. His work has appeared on many covers I’ve designed over the years (they’re also brilliant for scrolling through, just to see if any typographic ideas immediately jump out at you). Cecilia is set in Prhyme, which was one of these fonts. “Bold and just a little wrong” is an aesthetic category I can never get enough of. With such a short title and an author name that is begging to be stacked, it seemed to hit a lot of the notes we were looking for.

What about the color palette?
Black for crows, night, and mystery. Pink cuts against the severity of the black and is associated with love, sex, femininity, and … guts! I normally associate this combination of colors with cheap makeup packaging and that kind of thing, but tinting the image with a tiny amount of purple and yellow helped pull everything in a more sophisticated direction. It’s one of those subliminal things that you end up feeling your way towards rather than actively thinking about it.

The post 15 of the Best Book Covers of the Month: June 2024 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Annual Reports

First Place

SPH This Year 2023
Susan Prentiss – Boston University Creative Services
USA

Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) is preparing for its 50th anniversary in 2026 by releasing a series of annual report-type publications over the next four years. The theme of the 2023 issue is “Our People,” focusing on individuals who have significantly contributed to BUSPH’s legacy. The design aims to create a visual narrative that connects with the audience, featuring stories of these key figures. Inspired by the Beatles’ ampersand typographic pattern, the cover design exudes celebration and vibrancy, using copper foil to draw attention and highlight the names of current faculty and staff. The accompanying duster includes portraits of faculty and staff, setting the tone for this special edition.

Additional credits: Illustrator, Diego Kuffer; Maureen Moran, Rhonda Mello, Rob Davison, Charles Alfier, Veronica Beaudoin, Pam Cooley, Josh Comas-Race. Printer, Kirkwood

Second Place

The Smithsonian Annual Report
Jason Mannix – Polygraph
USA

The Smithsonian Institution, comprising 21 museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park, and nine research centers, collaborated with Polygraph for its 2022 annual report. This report highlights 38 individuals driving the organization forward, creating a cohesive narrative that spans various disciplines. Structured sections group people under common titles, using photographic and illustrative portraiture to add energy and diversity. Short sheets within the editorial grid introduce a playful texture and rhythm, resulting in a richly woven portrait that showcases the Smithsonian’s cultural and scientific innovation.

Additional credits: Lindsay Mannix, Gavin Wade, Laura Hambleton, Elizabeth McNeely, and the entire team at the Smithsonian Office of Advancement. Photography, Stephen Voss, Schaun Champion, Mike Morgan, Paul Chinnery

Third Place

The future is Nuclear, Bruce Power Annual Review and Energy Report
Erin Grandmaison – Bruce Power
USA

The 2023 Bruce Power Annual Review and Energy Report showcases the achievements and partnerships of the past year, emphasizing the pathway to a clean energy future. The Creative Strategy team incorporated a graphical line throughout the design to symbolize various paths, such as journeys, electrical circuits, and future directions. The design features bold text and colors paired with delicate elements like thin lines and icons, creating a dynamic visual contrast. A vibrant electric yellow, an enhanced version of their safety yellow, was used to evoke a futuristic and energetic feel. Documentary-style photography highlights people and the natural environment, with intentional yellow and blue accents to signify safety, light, and innovation. Additionally, the data visualizations were redesigned to improve comprehension and complement the report’s narrative.

Additional credits: Designer, Jessica Hillis; Communications/Writing, Tim McKay, Kate Bagshaw, Megan Adams; Web Development, Jen Johannesen. Photography, Francis Lodaza and Riley Snelling. Printer, Flash Reproductions

Student Honorees – Annual Reports

First Place – Victims First Annual Report by Aurora Schaefer, University of North Texas, USA

Books—Covers, Jackets

First Place

Opinions
Robin Bilardello – Harper
USA

The book jacket design for Opinions by Roxane Gay, created by Robin Bilardello, follows the impactful designs of Gay’s previous works, Bad Feminist and Hunger. Opinions is a collection of Gay’s best nonfiction pieces from the past decade, covering a wide range of topics including politics, feminism, culture wars, civil rights, and more. The anthology includes a new introduction where Gay reflects on the past ten years in America. Known for her role as a New York Times opinion contributor and “Work Friend” columnist, Gay addresses both societal issues and personal dilemmas with her wise and insightful voice. This thought-provoking collection is set to engage her existing fans and attract new readers.

Additional credits: Hand-drawn Type and Author Illustration, Robin Bilardello. Printer, Phoenix

Second Place

Evil Eye
Milan Bozic – Harper
USA

In her new novel, Etaf Rum explores the expectations placed on Palestinian-American women and the impact of unresolved family history. After protagonist Yara faces workplace trouble, her mother attributes it to a family curse, prompting Yara to reflect on her strict upbringing in Brooklyn. Rum’s follow-up to A Woman Is No Man delves into intergenerational trauma and the struggle to break free from cycles of abuse.

Additional credits: Illustration and typography, Lauren Tamaki. Printer, Phoenix

Third Place

Feminist Designer: On the Personal and the Political in Design
Alison Place – University of Arkansas
USA

Feminist Designer, edited by Alison Place, delves into the intersection of design and feminist theory, moving beyond the traditional focus on women’s representation in the field. The book emphasizes collaborative processes that challenge power structures and center feminist perspectives. Designed as a feminist project, it features typefaces created by women, non-binary, or trans designers, bold typography on the cover reminiscent of protest chants, and purple hues symbolizing suffragette history and contemporary activism. Every contributor’s name is prominently displayed on the cover, reflecting the feminist principle of giving credit where it’s due.

Student Honorees – Books—Covers & Jackets

First Place – Zubaan by Ariana Gupta, School of Visual Arts, USA
Second Place – Speaking in Tongues by Yoon Seo Kim, School of Visual Arts, USA
Third Place – Artist Book by Jiawen Zhang, School of Visual Arts, USA

Books—Entire Package

First Place

Milton Glaser, POP
Mirko Ilic – Mirko Ilic Corp.
USA

Milton Glaser, POP contains well over 1100 visuals, covering Milton Glaser’s work from when he was a 12-year-old (1942) to 1975. The book contains many unknown or lesser-known and unpublished works of Milton. This includes some sketches and comps. The challenge was to design the book without distracting from Glaser’s work.

Second Place

Type Something For Me
Joyce Shi – G Axis Press
USA

Type Something For Me documents an interest in typography through three distinct perspectives: type as enigma, type as a way of seeing, and type as reflection. It is the capstone of a year-long exploration into what type can be, and is meant to serve as a starting point for further investigation. With articles such as “The Power of Design(ers)?” “Design as Commodity,” “On Art and Its Form in the Age of Mass Media,” and a number of others, Shi has crafted a volume that offers multiple points of entry for those interested in thinking more deeply about typography and its effects.

Third Place

Alucinação
Felipe Goes – Felipe Goes Designer
Abu Dhabi

This work, curated and edited by Rodrigo Marques from a poem by Samuel Maciel Martins, captures the everyday lives of young, black individuals on the outskirts of Brazil with dense and precise language. Born in Quixeramobim, Martins introduces a persona striving to preserve personal and ancestral memories through a daring artistic consciousness, offering profoundly resonant poems. The book’s black-only print and simple visual design emphasize a rhythm based on mathematical relationships, with stitching as a graphical element. The dust jacket features a poster with simple shapes and vibrant screen-printed colors, contrasting the book’s minimalism. This project, focusing on visual aesthetics and meticulous detail, embodies imaginative fervor and hallucination,

Student Honorees – Books—Entire Package

First Place – Bento Memories by Shiyao Wu, China
Second Place – Dos Palmares by Maíra dos Palmares Santa, Brazil
Third Place – Six-Legged Book by Seo Jin Lee, School of Visual Arts, USA

Brochures & Catalogs

First Place

Naked Trails
Kyle Poff – Leo Burnett Chicago
USA

Granola is often seen as a commodity but Bear Naked aims to elevate its brand from functional to emotional through a campaign designed by Leo Burnett Chicago. Targeting hikers and outdoor enthusiasts, the campaign encourages thinking “Bear Naked” over “granola,” emphasizing the brand’s real ingredients and great taste. As attitudes towards nudity, mental health, and self-expression shift, the niche community of nude hikers has grown. However, despite being legal in National Parks, nude hiking faces challenges due to inconsistent enforcement. Bear Naked’s “Naked Trails,” powered by Gaia GPS, provides a safe, community-supported trail system for nude hikers. Launched on Naked Hiking Day 2023, the campaign partnered with Outside Inc. to produce custom content, video, and social engagement, promoting safe and confident exploration of nature. Additionally, they created a hiker’s belt to hold granola, ensuring hikers are always prepared.

Second Place

MCA NOW
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Design Studio
USA

With the international re-opening of museums, the Museum of Contemporary Art produced MCA NOW to amplify museum programming and exhibitions. Building awareness of the MCA to a broad audience, including families, art lovers, and tourists, this new series of collateral is designed as part of a brand refresh to be welcoming and encourage repeat visitation. This first issue, distributed in-person and mailed, transforms from a matte, bi-fold booklet into a 20 x20 inch glossy poster that lists the events and exhibitions of the season. The Creative Studio at the MCA centered full-color, inspirational imagery of both art and the community within the asset, using hits of neon pink from the updated brand palette to highlight museum information and event summaries.

Additional credits: Designer, Brian Hedrick; Director of Creative, Suraiya Nathani Hossain; Production Designer, Katie Williams; Creative Producer, Drew Colglazier; Director of Content Strategy, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan; Senior Editor, Tyler Laminack; Chief Communications and Content Officer, Laura Herrera

Third Place

I.a.Eyeworks Booklet
Becca Lofchie – Becca Lofchie Studio
USA

With more than 40 years of groundbreaking work in the realm of optical design, retail/wholesale development, and a frequently slippery, idiosyncratic brand identity, the parameters outlining this print project for l.a.Eyeworks asked for something gigantic in scope and condensed in presentation. The publication’s designer was tasked with serving multiple goals: to encapsulate l.a.Eyeworks’ enormous visual and material history into five “pillars” without becoming a dense and confining history/chronology; to create a document with multiple points of entry and enticing reveals from front to back (and back to front) for anyone unfamiliar with the brand; to make a training manual of sorts for opticians who sell l.a.Eyeworks glasses worldwide; to create a document alluring enough to find a place front of house in independent optical boutiques; to likewise craft a publication that would stand apart from glossy seasonal look books that crowd the optical field; to illuminate the brand’s affinity for artistic collaboration, passion for expressive color, and devotion to thought-provoking wordplay; and above all, to honor the pioneering eyewear designs and visual culture of l.a.Eyeworks.

Additional credits: Photography, Joshua Schaedel

Student Honorees – Brochures & Catalogs

First Place – FORM by Fiona Tran, Drexel University, USA

Concept Work

First Place

Orb Time Font (OTF)
Raven Mo
USA

This clock is called OTF, or Orb Time Font. Living on a tiny blue orb that is the Earth, time is what we all experience, and fonts are the shapes of our languages. Before Raven Mo started research in script and language representation in design, the designer had always thought that our creative industry works around what seems to be everyone’s norm. Design for English-speaking users is just called design, and Latin typography is mostly just typography. Though humans revolve around what is perceived as default, like clockwork, there is so much more beyond Latin and English. To that end, Orb Time Font gives users the choice to recenter the conversation, to people who are native to the language they speak.

Second Place

Hand Copying Meditation
Miki Kawamura
Germany

Miki Kawamura embarked on a year-long project to craft a unique alphabet influenced by Japanese Buddhist principles, fashioning each letter as if reciting a prayer. Inspired by the Japanese belief in perseverance and repetition fostering transformation, Kawamura sought to create a new visual realm by arranging basic elements into bubble-like structures, symbolizing adaptability and diverse meanings through different combinations. Initially resembling typical text posters, a closer look reveals the alphabet embedded within clusters of bubbles, with notable examples including ‘Fizzy’ and ‘The flow of the river is constant and it is not original water,’ achieved by printing the alphabet and spraying water droplets over them. The phrase ‘The flow of the river is constant and it is not original water’ embodies Buddhist concepts of impermanence and ongoing change, encapsulating Kawamura’s reflections throughout the project within the bubbles.

Third Place

Afar: Cultural Cards
Andy Vera
USA

“Afar” is a customized version of the popular two-player card game, Lost Cities, played by designer Andy Vera and his long-distance boyfriend. The project involves the creation of bespoke card decks that reflect their unique identities and shared journeys, with a website documenting the design process. Inspired by their Indian and Mexican heritage, the decks feature thematic elements symbolizing unity and individuality, including a vibrant color palette inspired by Mexico City, Arabic horses representing Vera’s family history, and jaguars symbolizing strength and transformation in Mexican mythology. The face cards replace the traditional Jack with representations of the Queen, King, and “Joining,” signifying unity, while floral motifs from both cultures adorn the cards, with the lotus flower symbolizing divine perfection and unity in their relationship.

Additional credits: Printer, Make Playing Cards

Design for Social Impact

First Place

Foundry Field
Clinton Carlson – Clinton Carlson Design | University of Notre Dame
USA

Foundry Field in South Bend, Indiana, is poised to become one of the rare publicly accessible baseball fields in the urban core, representing a collaboration among various community stakeholders, including an adult recreational baseball league, neighborhood association, Boys & Girls Club, Civil Rights Heritage Center, public schools, and the city’s parks department. Named after the Foundry Giants, an all-Black baseball team from the 1920s, the field seeks to revive history by honoring underrepresented teams and narratives, including an all-black women’s team from the 1940s, a Potawatomi team from the early 1900s, and the pivotal role of South Bend in baseball’s integration in 1947. Featuring murals by underrepresented artists depicting these histories, Foundry Field aims to ignite conversations about race, representation, and accessibility, enhancing the space alongside a vintage baseball field, hand-operated scoreboard, public pavilion, and historical markers. Intended as a community gathering spot for intergenerational play, the project celebrates the strength, resilience, and innovation of historically underrepresented community members.

Additional credits: Creative Director: Clinton Carlson; Design: Clinton Carlson, Kiaya Jones, Neve Harrison, Kenny Garrett, Taylor Li, Catie Procyk, Jennifer Santana, Thomas “Detour” Evans, and, students from Boys & Girls Club and Riley High School; Producer: Clinton Carlson, Michael Hebbeler; Research: Katie Walden, Greg Bond, and Baseball and America students from the University of Notre Dame, Kevin Buccellato, Clinton Carlson, Michael Hebbeler, Matthew Insley, Sean Kennedy, Nick Mainieri; Copywriting: Clinton Carlson, Michael Hebbeler, Matthew Insley, Sean Kennedy, Nick Mainieri, Carrie Gates Jantzen

Second Place

One Small Step
I/D.W Studio
USA

A recent Pew Research Center poll highlighted widespread frustration among Americans regarding the tone of political discourse, particularly leading up to the 2024 election. In response, StoryCorps and I/D.W launched One Small Step, an initiative promoting unity by facilitating conversations between individuals with diverse political views. The initiative garnered significant media attention, including coverage on major platforms such as 60 Minutes and The Wall St. Journal, reaching millions of viewers and generating over 20 million paid media impressions in 2023. I/D.W’s design strategy prioritizes inclusivity, with a scalable design system tailored to each city to encourage widespread adoption and participation. Expanding into Washington DC, the initiative engaged 16 Congressional members from opposing parties, demonstrating its potential to bridge political divides.

Additional credits: Executive Creative Director, Leigh Okies; Creative Director, Sorenne Gotlieb; Design Director, Enrique Barrios; Executive Producer, Alex Ashton; Integrated Producer, Yesenia Lara; Strategist, Sarah Thorpe; Copywriter, David Begler; Photography, Drew Kelly; Motion DP, Andrew Birchett

Third Place

Curt Bloch and his Onderwater Cabaret
Thilo von Debschitz – Q
Germany

During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Curt Bloch, a German Jew, evaded deportation and death by creating 96 magazines titled “Het Onderwater-Cabaret,” containing nearly 500 German and Dutch poems over three years. These circulated within the Enschede resistance network, reflecting Bloch’s emotions of fear, despair, and hope for freedom. Now, 80 years later, these magazines and poems are showcased on curtbloch.com, providing insight into Bloch’s courageous efforts. The website, developed with Bloch’s daughter Simone and supported by German Rotary Clubs, aims to educate about Nazi injustices in the face of contemporary nationalism and antisemitism. It features keyword lists, timelines, and trilingual content, with volunteers worldwide assisting in translating the poems and providing historical context on editorial pages.

Additional credits: Tim Siegert, Normen Beck, Markus Reweland, Mathias Schaab, Luella Döringer, Janic Bussat, Linda Eisenlohr

Student Honorees – Design for Social Impact

First Place – Elephant in the Room by Eason Yang, USA
Second Place – Phantom Limbs: Design Interventions and Site-specific Storytelling by Veronica Tsai, Art Center College of Design, USA
Third Place – Ace Week by Nicole Tocco, Savannah College of Art and Design, USA

Handlettering & Type Design

First Place

Handy Type
Rozi Zhu and Haocheng Zhang
USA

Handy Type revolutionizes type design by integrating interactive hand-tracking data into its dynamic font creation process. Departing from traditional pre-designed typography, Handy Type enables anyone to craft personalized fonts from anywhere, at any time. With the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, a customized system was made for capturing hand-motion data, aiming to create a new approach to the type design, making both the design process and use experience more playful and innovative.

Additional credits: Lead Designer / Creative Technologist, Rozi Zhu; Designer, Haocheng Zhang

Second Place

Life Less Scary Alphabet
Mitchell Goodrich – Dunn&Co.
USA

Grow Financial, a Federal Credit Union launched the “Life Less Scary” campaign to address the financial anxieties experienced by millennials and Gen-Z. The campaign aimed to recognize and alleviate these fears by personifying financial products as friendly monsters. The design team collaborated with 3D artists to create an alphabet of “monster letters,” which were used in out-of-home placements to represent Grow’s core financial products in a playful yet relatable way. Inflatable versions of the monster letters were featured on billboards, while custom-made monster costumes appeared on various digital and social media platforms, emphasizing the message that financial products can be less intimidating with the help of Grow Financial.

Additional credits: Chief Creative Officer, Troy Dunn; Creative Director, Stephanie Morrison

Third Place

The Typography of a Genius Industry
Gaetano Grizzanti – Univisual
Italy

Fittype is a custom typeface designed for FITT, a prominent European group specializing in garden hose production and advanced fluid technologies. The font utilized for the institutional logo, product names, and communication texts reflects the flexibility associated with the company’s products. Fittype features slender and sinuous letters, with a unicase glyph set that maintains rational proportions and a modular matrix, creating a clean texture reminiscent of an infrastructure network of pipes. It includes 464 glyphs, covering 42 Latin languages, and is available in three versions: desktop, web, and app.

Additional credits: Giancarlo Tosoni

Student Honorees – Handlettering & Type Design

First Place – Up in the Air Gonggi Typography by Jae Young Kim, Pratt Institute, USA
Second Place – Amunet Type by Xinyu Liu, School of Visual Arts, USA
Third Place – Bird Words by Jada Merritt, California Institute of the Arts, USA

Illustration

First Place

Metropolitan Transportation Authority Courtesy Campaign
Ricky Sethiadi – MTA Marketing
USA

The MTA’s “Courtesy Counts” campaign was designed to remind subway, bus, and railroad customers to be considerate of their fellow riders. The campaign seeks to nudge passengers toward better behavior by depicting everyday transit scenes with lively illustrations, witty taglines, and splashes of color. The MTA leveraged nearly 10,000 digital screens, printed posters, and its social media accounts to highlight over 35 unique illustrations covering each mode of transportation, winning positive local media coverage. As more people return to public transportation and re-socialize to life outside their living rooms, “Courtesy Counts” is a fun, friendly reminder that the city works best when we treat each other with respect and kindness.

Additional credits: Designer, John Wong; Illustrator, Sophie Ong; Writer, Chris Sartinsky

Second Place

Joystick Jazz
Mark Borgions – HandMade Monsters
Belgium

This project is the cover art of a 12″ vinyl album containing big band interpretations of classic videogame tunes (Sonic, Donkey Kong, Megaman, Zelda, … ). The album’s music is by the Blueshift Big Band. This release is produced by production company iam8bit in Los Angeles. The cover depicts the main characters of the included games in a jazzy art-style rendering, balanced with recognizable props from these games and musical instruments — all subscribing to the style of the music. The art is produced straight to digital with a limited color scheme (yellow, red, green, cyan), all 100% flat color and their blending, with minor shadow grain. The artwork included the front and back cover, front and back inner sleeve, and labels for this single record release.

Vinyl Producer, Bailey Moses

Third Place

Simple Mills Illustrations
Ellie Schwarts – Design B&B
USA

Vibrant, energetic, and rich, the Simple Mills illustration style conveys the brand’s nutrient-rich and diverse offerings in the better-for-you food aisles. The illustrations artfully highlight the ingredients used across the Simple Mills portfolio, narrate the farming practices that grow them, and hero the individuals who enjoy them. Balanced with a simple geometry inspired by the Simple Mills logo, the library of artwork adds depth, appetite appeal, and humanity to the brand’s expression.

Additional credits: Ellie Schwartz, Olivia Noll, Sammy Smith, Parker Sheley

Student Honorees – Illustration

First Place – Stilts, Bears & Skeletons by Heike Scharrer, Cambridge School of Art, United Kingdom
Second Place – Neon by Xiaoyun Tian, Cambridge School of Art, United Kingdom
Third Place – Gulf Horizons by Jazmine Garcia, University of North Texas, USA

Invitations & Announcements

First Place

Marwen Invitations
Brian Berk – Leo Burnett Chicago
USA

The Marwen Paintbrush Ball is an annual event supporting Chicago’s youth through art, uniting philanthropists and community leaders. Funds raised sustain Marwen’s youth programs, ensuring accessibility without financial burden. Inspired by Marwen’s Art@Work internship program, the design team merged “art” and “work” in their visual language, imagining interns’ creative expressions with office supplies. This approach underscores art’s transformative power and the potential for creativity in everyday materials.

Additional credits: Alisa Wolfson, Shereen Boury; Printer, The Fox Company

Second Place

Monroe Community College Foundation Gold Star Gala Invitations
Jewel Mastrodonato – Dixon Schwabl + Company
USA

The Monroe Community College Foundation’s annual Gold Star Gala is a fundraising event supporting MCC students through scholarships. Each year, a new theme is adopted to generate excitement and attendance. In 2023, the theme was “Wonka’s Garden,” offering a glimpse into Willy Wonka’s colorful and flavorful garden. The agency tasked with developing the concept created a captivating invitation experience. Using specialty print techniques like holographic foil stamping and seed paper, the invitation resembled candy and promised a magical event. A magnifying card allowed recipients to explore hidden messages, enhancing engagement. The event successfully raised $300,000 for student scholarships.

Additional credits: Mark Stone-Chief Creative Officer, Marshall Statt-Executive Creative Director, Nick Guadagnino Copywriter, Stephanie Miller-Prepress Supervisor, Bob Charboneau-Director of Production, Jen Moritz-Senior Copy Editor, Amanda Maxim-Account Director, Mel Brand- Account Supervisor

Third Place

American Heart Association Gala Invitation Suite
Hana Snell – Caliber Creative
USA

Inspired by this year’s theme of floral elegance, the invitation suite designed for the American Heart Association’s annual Côtes du Coeur gala incorporates blossoming greenery and romantic regency into a garden of printed materials. The delicate hand-drawn blossoms, wine motifs, customized script typography, and opulent gold details set the tone for an enchanting vineyard escape of an evening. The set of invitations welcomes patrons to events of indulgence and philanthropy, all leading to the main gala in support of the fight against heart disease.

Additional credits: Brandon Murphy, Erin Brachman

Logos

First Place

Turks Head
CF Napa Brand Design
USA

Pennsylvania’s Main Line Wine Company is a unique establishment featuring a wine lounge, tasting room, and community wine education center exclusively serving their flagship brand, Turks Head. The brand name pays homage to the Turks Head Tavern, a significant historical landmark in West Chester. The project aimed to create an upscale, exclusive brand identity that was simple, elegant, and easily recognizable. CF Napa drew inspiration from the clean design of the tasting room and the Turk’s head knot, a symbol of unity. They developed an icon based on the knot, incorporating an interlocking TH monogram, representing the brand’s connection to the community. The icon, embossed with gold foil, stands out on clean white labels, ensuring brand recognition. The label system allows for flexibility across various SKUs, with a color-coding system highlighting different AVAs and supporting the brand’s educational efforts on terroir impact.

Second Place

Benny’s Bike Shop
Sam Allan – Onfire.Design
New Zealand

Benny Devcich, a legendary figure in the New Zealand bicycling community, established a boutique bicycle shop focusing on professional bike fitting, high-end service, and rare components. Onfire was tasked with creating the brand for this unique shop. Inspired by Benny’s larger-than-life personality and iconic moustache, the design team developed a modern-retro wordmark and moustache icon reminiscent of early 20th-century bicycle emblems. The color palette, featuring British racing green, reflects the historical significance of bicycling culture. The brand has been applied across various materials, including printed collateral, signage, cycling uniforms, and promotional items. Even the wooden ramp leading to the store is hot branded with the logo, honoring cycling history and Benny himself.

Third Place

Kinetic Identity
One Design Company
USA

Kinetic is developing an infrastructure-as-a-service solution aimed at streamlining maintenance for modern digitized vehicles. Their offerings promise seamless speed, accuracy, and precision. The Kinetic logo and monogram reflect their comprehensive, self-contained solution, featuring bespoke letterforms evoking engineering and cutting-edge technology. The visual system, comprising illustration, iconography, animation, photography, and video, honors the innovative solutions designed to ease the transition to the modern era of mobility for various stakeholders in the automotive industry.

Additional credits: David Sieren, Hannah Cormier, Karly Hoffman, Erick Morales, Ryan Paule, Mike Phillips, Danielle Pierre, Kristen Romaniszak; Photography, Connor Weitz

Student Honorees – Logos

First Place – Architectural Digest by Mishen Liu, Art Center College of Design, USA
Second Place – Tiger Ale by Emily Brown, The University of Texas at Arlington, USA

NEXT: Learn more about the winning entries in packaging, data visualization, IX/UX, motion design, environmental/exhibition design, and outdoor/billboards.

The post PRINT Awards 2024 Spotlight: Winners in Type, Illustration, Logos, Book Design, Social Impact & More appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Dig into Monahan’s insights below—as well as the book’s synopsis, which reinforces how perfectly he captures the vibe of the novel—and then get lost in the rest of this month’s kaleidoscopic covers.

Official description: Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student researching 1950s lesbian pulp who smells like metallic orchids, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.

Penelope, a painter living off Urban Outfitters settlement money, immediately ingratiates herself in Astrid’s life, bonding with her best friends and family, just as Astrid and Ivy begin to date in person. Astrid feels judged and threatened by Penelope, a responsible older vegan, but also finds her irresistibly sexy. When Astrid receives an unexpected call from her agent with the news that actress and influencer Kat Gold wants to adapt her previous novel for TV, Astrid finally has a chance to resurrect her waning career. But the pressure causes Astrid’s worst vice to rear its head—the Patricia Highsmith, a blend of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes—and results in blackouts and a disturbing series of events.

Unapologetically feminine yet ribald, steamy yet hilarious, Anna Dorn has crafted an exquisite homage to the lesbian pulp of yore, reclaiming it for our internet and celebrity-obsessed world. With notes of Southern California citrus and sultry smokiness, Perfume and Pain is a satirical romp through Hollywood and lesbian melodrama.

How did you arrive at the final design, and what’s going on within it?
After reading the manuscript, I knew I wanted the cover to offer something sexy with a twinge of toxic (Astrid makes so many bad decisions). Both the story and the author called for a nod to classic lesbian pulp art for the cover, since it plays such a big role in the book. 

Where did you source that image that’s seen inside the bottle?
Obviously we wanted to nod to the pulp classic of the same title, especially since they talk about it throughout the novel. Finding a pulp image that works was easy, finding one that we could license was another. While it’s not the most exciting part of the job, it is something you always have in the back of your mind: Do I risk it and use something I found, hoping we can find the source/license if it’s approved? Or do I wade through the hordes of licensable imagery hoping to be excited?

How did you select the type treatment? 
Type can emphasize or oppose. In this design I wanted it to oppose the softness and simpleness of the imagery with something sharp and, again, hint at classic pulp.

What about that amazing electric color palette? 
The color palette MADE this design. It fulfilled everything I wanted the design to do. I worked directly with the printer to make sure we got it right—fluorescent inks, hot reds, and that toxic green.

What other comps did you explore before arriving at the final design?
Ecstasy, toxicity, softness, danger. [Ed. note: See three of the other designs below.]

How often do projects cross your desk like this where you know you’re going to have a ball?
I’m fortunate enough to be working in-house at Simon & Schuster, so the projects that land on my desk are VARIED, ranging from literary to commercial, historical nonfiction to brand new technology. I’m grateful to be able to flex those design muscles by working on all of it. However, every once in a while a title shows up that I know I’m going to savor. Push everything else off the desk! But it’s not just the book that’s required for this potion to work. You need to have the right author and editor in the mix. Anna Dorn and her editor, Olivia Taylor Smith, are both amazing and both people I haven’t worked with before. Based on Dorn’s writing and Smith’s pitch, I knew this was going to be fun! The final decision was quick. No revisions. A dream.

The post 23 of the Best Book Covers of May appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Lowrider culture is far from specific to Los Angeles, with vibrant pockets represented around the country. The nonprofit lowrider organization Slow & Low recently published a retrospective book of the same title, the first formal documentation of the lowrider community in Chicago. In partnership with Nick Adam’s team at the design studio Span, Slow & Low was created with the utmost thought and care to showcase the photographic archive of twelve years of the nonprofit’s events and festivals. In addition to its gorgeous and vibrant imagery, the book features essays from Slow & Low co-founder and curator Lauren M. Pacheco and ethnographer, cultural critic, and professor Dr. Ben Chappell.

Span took on the design of Slow & Low with the imperative that every detail and aspect of the book must somehow reflect lowrider culture. They worked closely with Pacheco and her co-founder, Peter Kepha, to ensure they achieved this, from the editorial considerations to the page layouts and materials.

The book’s grid, for example, creates an elaborate page sequencing system that balances variation and repetition, creating perspective shifts and contextual relationships. From page to page, the photo compositions create a filmic cadence where motion, zooming, and surrounding angles evoke the sensation of cruising.

Lowrider culture is about far more than cars, and Slow & Low aptly reflects that. Beloved community photographers shot the 112-page photo archive presented throughout the book with a firsthand understanding of the culture, offering an intimate and authentic insider’s perspective. The range of photos depicts lowriding as a way for individuals and the community to have a voice of creativity and pride, featuring waving Mexican flags, airbrushed Aztec symbols, and folklórico performances in the background, to name a few.

The photos have been curated and sequenced by Span and then printed in full color with a spot gloss varnish on high-gloss coated paper. This meticulous process better reflects the look of the candy-colored cars on display, a nod to the vibrant aesthetics of lowrider culture. The effect also feels like a family photo album. The book’s front and back are printed with silver ink on natural paper to contrast the glossiness of the photos. The silver ink has a reflective quality inspired by the engraved chrome of lowrider cars and viclas.

The book’s body copy is set in Canela, designed by Miguel Reyes at Commercial Type. Each column of the Canela text baselines to the bottom of the page and rises to hit different heights meant to represent the hydraulic bounce of a lowrider. The display type is Respira, designed by Lucas Sharp with Wei Huang at Sharp Type. Respira was inspired by blackletter, which is a signature lettering style in lowrider and Chicano cultures.

Meanwhile, the Slow & Low front and back covers also feature the blackletter style, stamped in white foil on a black textile texture. The form is reminiscent of the letter-based tattoos that read top-to-bottom on many forearms within the lowrider community. This style also pays homage to the way churches often depict text, given the importance of faith within those in the lowrider community.

The book is stitched with myth-sewn binding to open flat, allowing you to immerse yourself in each photo fully. It concludes with a series of 360 silver ink photo booth photos featuring over 1,000 members of Chicago’s lowrider community, all taken at the 2022 Slow & Low festival at Navy Pier.

Concept, Design Direction, Design, Content Collection & Curation: Nick Adam

Design: Grace Song and Cheryl Kao

Printing: OGM

Writers: Lauren M. Pacheco and Dr. Ben Chappell

Curators: Lauren M. Pacheco, Peter Kepha, and Edward Magico Calderon

Photographers: Carmen Ordonez, Carolina Sánchez, Don’t Get Shot, Edward Magico Calderon, Fernando Ruiz, Katrina Nelken, Manuel Lagunas, Manuel Velasco, Max Herman, Mike Pocious, Nick Lipton, Peter Kepha, Sebastián Hildalgo, and Nick Adam

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Given the weight of the assignment, it’s perhaps no surprise that it took a lot of work. Or, as designer Arsh Raziuddin put it, “5 [million] options for weeks on end.” You can see a fraction of those comps on Raziuddin’s Instagram—and below, you can find the final cover that hit bookstores last week. It’s restrained, if not elegant—yet hauntingly captures the story of Rushdie’s attack and his recovery in the wake of it.

Elsewhere this month: Na Kim delivers a perfect watercolor cover with some Ralph Steadman vibes for Rough Trade—a novel set around opium smugglers in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s. Emily Mahon seems to utterly nail the tone of The Most Famous Girl in the World—which isn’t out until September, but features the tagline, “Stars―they’re just like us! Except much, much worse.” And Tom Etherington hypnotically delves into book design’s past.

Here are 15 of our favorite book covers that were revealed or published this month.

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Palookaville 24 (Drawn & Quarterly), a long-awaited installment of Seth’s longtime series, is the perfect evocation of his contextually complex and graphically precise manner of rendering high-contrast geometrical compositions. The choice of Art Deco–inspired lettering for the title is a satisfying typographic complement to the spare cover image.

Elise Gravel’s microbes (Club Microbe, Drawn & Quarterly) are not exactly the same germs found under a microscope, but maybe with extremely powerful magnification the free-loading organisms that populate our bodies actually do have quirky human characteristics. And why wouldn’t they? Gravel’s lively and engaging cover design certainly makes one consider the possibilities.

Pierre La Police’s cover for Masters of the Nefarious: Mollusk Rampage (New York Review of Comics), translated by Luke Burns, quietly introduces a raging off-center adventure starring two mutant twins who share the job of paranormal investigators. Their mission is to solve crimes and combat evil along with their splotch-faced, bulbous-headed best friend, Fongor Fonzym. The cover art seductively hints at the surreal war with mollusks left in the wake of a freak tsunami.

Unknown Pleasures by Tomer Hanuka (Ginko Press) is not actually a graphic novel, per se, but it is a collection of the artist’s exceptional narrative graphics, with the most inventive lettering (on front and back covers) shown here. (I hope he’ll consider turning it into a font.) The book contains a variety of reimagined film posters as well as illustrations for magazines and self-initiated projects. As a special production feature, the cover and back cover are die-cuts—and I love die-cuts.

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A few highlights and (non Community) notes:

• Cover design has been thriving in vintage type treatments, layouts, and all visual terrain in between. What I’ve loved lately: Those fascinating covers where past bleeds into present (if not future)—such as in Kishan Rajani’s work on Little Rot.
• I’ve spoken to different designers over the years about the challenges presented by short story collections (in particular: How does one craft a single image to represent a dozen or more disparate parts?). Especially when, say, the collection goes like this: “An influencer attempts to derail a viral TV marketing campaign with her violent cult following. A marriage between two ghost hunters is threatened when one of them loses her ability to see spirits. The lives of a famous painter in the twilight of her career and a teenage UFO enthusiast converge when a mysterious glowing orb appears in their small desert town. And a slasher-flick screenwriter looking for inspiration escapes a pack of wild dogs only to find herself locked in an SUV with a strange man beside her. Set primarily in deserts throughout the American Southwest, Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights is a debut collection of stories about women and girls at the crossroads of mundane daily life and existential dread.” Beth Steidle somehow flawlessly pulled everything together in a surreal and enigmatic jacket accented by an utterly perfect typeface.
• And finally, March brought some striking backlist work from Malika Favre and Coralie Bickford-Smith (that tooth!).

Here are the rest of our favorite book covers revealed or released this month(-ish). 

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I overheard two people talking at the Rizzoli bookstore in Manhattan the other day. “I don’t know the author,” said one, holding a paperback. “Nor do I,” said the other, “but I love the cover. Give me a good cover, and I’ll try reading the book.”

What else can a publisher ask for? Unless supported by a strong PR campaign, most titles sold in the few brick-and-mortar shops left are designed for browsers who don’t know a book by its cover, but are compelled by that very thing to buy it.

A true test of that principle is if a book that’s now long out of print is as eye-catching as when it was first published. And I’m often finding vintage books that do just that. Two of my favorites of late are these by George Giusti (1908–1990), whose minimalist representational illustrative designs for books, records, periodicals and ads dominated the late ’50s and ’60s popular media.

The two volumes shown here were on my high school reading list. At the time I had no idea who the authors were or what the books were about—and to this day I’d have trouble providing a viable summary without having to totally reread them—but I can say they are memorable to me because of their visually reductive yet thought-inspiring covers that struck a chord that’s lasted over 50-some years.

“Giusti is taken up with the discovery of pictures for things that are not accessible to the normal visual powers of the human eye,” wrote Georgine Oeri in Graphis 26 (1949), “jobs in which a pictorial interpretation has to be found for the revelations of modern science.”

The post The Daily Heller: An Ode to Two of George Giusti’s Book Cover Designs appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

As someone blissfully lost in the magic of minutiae at the cost of the big picture, here are a few highlights from the cache of covers that have been published or announced this month:

• Eliot Weinberger thrives in the experimental, defying expectation in various literary contortions and distortions. And thus his new book—“not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images and allusions in the poetry”—was a delightfully straightforward fit with the stylings of Oliver Munday.
• For a novel that explores identity, Janet Hansen’s cover for Ask Me Again no doubt distills the essence of Clare Sestanovich’s prose. But tear it off the binding and it could work as an LP cover. Blow it up and it’s a poster. Throw it in a frame and hang it in an exhibition of your choice. With a few stark ingredients and an entrancing palette, Hansen’s alchemy is magnetic.
• And finally: When you look at Jamie Keenan’s cover for You Glow in the Dark, you will wonder: Did he really do it?! Well, in what had to be a mountain of utterly maddening work, yep, he really did.

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Kate Humphreys, a vintage children’s bookseller, has tapped into the inimitable magic of illustrated stories from a bygone era with her online shop, Oly Oly Oxen Free Books. The Nebraska-based Humphreys admits she has a bit of an obsession with vintage children’s books. “I love finding beautiful stories and sharing them with as many people as I can,” she writes on her Etsy shop. Humphreys also uses her delightful Instagram account as a sales channel for her books and to spread her love and appreciation for these classic, illustrated artifacts. She shares a careful curation of book covers, page spreads, and preciously drawn moments from her collection on the daily, amassing a lively community of followers who gush with glee on every post.

I contacted Humphreys to hear more about her vintage children’s book obsession and to get her expert opinion on why these books have such staying power in our souls. Her thoughtful responses are below!

(Interview edited for clarity and length.)

How did you first get into selling old children’s books?

The simple answer is that I had been collecting them for a number of years and started accumulating too many! I also had a hard time not purchasing good kids’ books at the thrift store, even if I already owned them. A friend suggested I open an Etsy store, and things went from there.

The more in-depth answer is that owning a children’s book store has been a fantasy dream job since I was a kid, like owning a candy shop or riding elephants in the circus. Something that your kid mind thinks is possible but your adult mind can’t come to terms with. I decided to ditch the rational adult thoughts and sell beautiful books with pictures.

I decided to ditch the rational adult thoughts and sell beautiful books with pictures in them.

What is it about children’s books that you find so obsession-worthy?

The picture book is the most underrated art form there is! Utilizing words and images to tell an engaging story to young people is no easy feat, and to own these small works of art by people who have indeed mastered that ability is magical. It’s the most affordable art one can own! Imagine if Picasso decided to make a children’s book; it would likely be no more expensive than one about burping dinosaurs!

Because of their brevity and the tendency for kids’ books to teach morality, the well-done ones are often wise and poetic. A story told simply is not always a simple story. A good children’s book embraces playfulness, and I believe play is an essential part of living a life of joy.

A good children’s book embraces playfulness, and I believe play is an essential part of living a life of joy.

What’s your process for choosing the books you sell and the illustrations you post on your Instagram?

I wish I could give you a secret formula, but I’m just buying what I like! That’s my only rule. I have to buy things I like. Sometimes I’ll find kids’ books that are probably worth something, but I don’t really feel drawn to them, so I don’t buy them.

As far as the illustrations I post on Instagram, I have to find images that work well in a small square. Lots of times, a book is remarkable but doesn’t have the perfect square image for the feed. Also, I’m usually looking for a picture that tells a story in and of itself.

What is it about vintage illustration aesthetics that makes them so captivating?

There is something about the analog nature of older printing techniques that imbues warmth! The fact that you can see where the color goes outside the line or imperfect inking draws you closer to the moment of creation. Also, making a children’s book took longer, and I think that extra time and consideration made for a better product. We all know that aesthetically speaking, something astounding happened in the 60s and 70s, that I won’t even attempt to explain.

Children’s media is so intimately tied to our upbringing, it’s impossible to separate the two. The book comes to represent a time and place and a moment, which is truly powerful! 

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. How do you see nostalgia at play in how people respond to your shop?

I didn’t consider the nostalgia element when I started my book account, but it’s certainly what brings many people to the page. I get so many questions about long-forgotten children’s books that I wish I could unearth them for people. Children’s media is so intimately tied to our upbringing that it’s impossible to separate the two. The book comes to represent a time, a place, and a moment, which is truly powerful!

Do you have a favorite children’s book from your childhood that was particularly formative for you?

Doctor DeSoto by William Steig was a particularly big book in my household.

There is a moment in the book when the fox, who is having his teeth worked on, has his mouth glued shut and tries to speak to his mouse dentist. My mom really delivered the fox’s line, “Fank oo berry mush” with such panache. It’s a tremendous memory.

Images courtesy Kate Humphreys.

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Epigraph of My Life in Paper by Beth Kephart

What does your paper say about you? Receipts in totes, scribbled notes shoved in pants pockets, birthday cards tucked in desk drawers, ticket stubs saved from clammy first dates to the cinema. This paper ephemera carries our stories and marks moments in a singular, physical way nothing else can. Such is the power of paper, to which author and paper maker Beth Kephart has become wholly devoted.

As part of Kephart’s ongoing exploration and adoration of paper, she recently penned a love letter to the medium as a memoir-style book entitled My Life in Paper (Temple University Press, 2023). After Kephart’s brother gifted her their mother’s old copy of the paper maker Dard Hunter’s (1883-1966) autobiography My Life with Paper (1958), Kephart’s obsession with paper extended to a deep and profound connection to Hunter. Through My Life in Paper, Kephart mines her bond with this kindred spirit through letters to Hunter interspersed with poetic reflections about categories of paper ephemera.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Kephart directly about her memoir, her love of hand-making paper and books, and the experience of moving through the world as an artist who defies category. Our conversation is below.

(Interview edited for clarity and length.)

When did you first develop the book arts side of your writing practice?

The death of my father in early August of 2020 was the beginning. I had been taking care of him on an almost daily basis for years, and then COVID hit, and I could only be with him when he was suddenly dying. It was a very rainy night. It was very late. I almost didn’t hear the phone. They allowed me to be with him for the first time in such a long time, and I was there at his death. It was so frustrating and heartbreaking.

What my dad always wanted was a funeral. When he was sick before that, and he couldn’t get to funerals, I would go to his friends’ funerals, and the first thing he would always ask was, “How many people were at the funeral?” It mattered to him for some reason; he thought that would be the measure of his life. And, of course, we buried him on the hill, my brother, my sister, our children, and that was it because of COVID. So what I began to do out of that sadness was, with very little knowledge, make these booklets; they were Gelli printed, they were hand stitched. They were designed for people who had loved my father to record their own stories. That became a two or three-month project, but I couldn’t stop.

How did you go from stitching those booklets to making your own paper by hand?

I was fascinated by hand-making paper, and then my husband gave me marbling paint. Then I started cyanotyping and solar fasting over cyanotypes and Gelli printing underneath them all. It just became something that felt suddenly inherent to me.

Because I am married to a real artist—he went to Yale, has his Masters in Architecture, and is an extraordinary oil painter and ceramicist—it didn’t feel like it was my domain. I was words, and he was art. And yet, it has become what binds us even more. Right now, actually, I’m making this handmade paper, and he’s going to be printing on it, and then I’m going to be adding words to it. There’s more integrative power. We’ve always done stuff together in a very long marriage, but now it’s really together.

It took me such a long time to become a writer who was not only not afraid of making mistakes but eager to make mistakes.

It’s interesting to me that you first put yourself into that words-only box. I’ve grappled with that myself, and I know a lot of other creatives do, too. We feel like we might need to choose a lane and stick to it, but if you are a genuinely creative being, usually that means you’re breaking down barriers and exploring different forms of art and media. What I love so much about My Life in Paper is that it feels like you’re doing a similar exploration by creating your own genre while writing and breaking existing genre molds. You’re expressing yourself in a form that doesn’t exist yet.

My work is so un-categorizable. Whether I’m writing young adult or history or whatever it is, what everybody says about me is, “You can’t be categorized in publishing’s tiered system. We don’t know where your work would go.” It is frustrating.

It took me such a long time to become a writer who was not only not afraid of making mistakes but eager to make mistakes.

I now don’t think I could write a book without having time in a day to go stitch one.

Can you elaborate on what it is about hand-making books and paper that you find so captivating?

Before working on the Dard Hunter, I was obsessed with Virginia Woolf. I’ve written many books that never get published, and one of those books was trying to put myself into her mind as she made books with her husband, Leonard.

I found that story to be remarkable. Virginia found, in paper and bookmaking, calm. Before she and her husband bought what turned out to be a broken press that they had to fix, she had one of her famous and long-lasting nervous breakdowns. Her half-brother was publishing her first novel, and it was making her anxious. Leonard, thinking, how can we salvage this great mind? went with her to buy the press on her birthday. She was the one who would place the typeface in; he was the one who would press it, and she would bind it.

I have that same relationship. I love making. I love making words. I love making a book. I’m terrified of the process afterward; I will not look at this book now that it’s there. I read from it once, and that’ll be it. But this idea of the letters, the typography stuff in her hands, the paper, and the ink on her fingertips calmed her— I find that to be very true in my own practice. I now don’t think I could write a book without having time in a day to go stitch one.

The crux of My Life in Paper is your infatuation and fascination with the great paper maker, Dard Hunter. Can you share more about your relationship with Dard?

Dard opened something in me. I was reading his My Life with Paper during a season when I doubted myself in many ways. But while reading Dard, I felt this sense of failure, a sense of disappointment in my work—not with fame but with the artistry of it. And I just fell into this conversation with him that felt entirely urgent.

Dard was imperfect. We’re all imperfect, but he used terminology when he was writing that is understood to be inappropriate now, like “primitive handmade paper.” When trying to understand how Dard’s encapsulation of some of the cultures he visited feels now versus my own sense of being swept into who he was in his time, I’ve been fortunate to be educated by a handful of artists and historians. They were able to nest my effusive love for Dard in, yes, but look at this. Yes, but consider this. And that is a way of honoring Dard, too.

The art that excites me the most is art in which I can feel the artist grappling with something in the process of making it, which is very much the case with so many of the ideas and themes you’re addressing within My Life in Paper.

My letters to Dard are intense; I cried writing to him. Especially when I thought about the end of his life. I felt like he was in the room with me. In my letters, I was saying, “Dard! I know it’s horrible! I feel that! I’ve been there! They can treat you like shit, Dard. But you’re somebody, and you’re somebody to me.”

It is so important as a writer to realize that you can fully empathize with and honor someone whose political philosophies differ greatly from yours. When you look at another’s life with complete sympathy and empathy and do the work of imagining it, everything else falls down. I think it’s important that we keep remembering the power of the empathetic imagination in this world, especially right now.

I was hoping you could walk me through the considerations that went into the design of My Life in Paper. Obviously, the book’s subject matter makes the physical book object incredibly important.

It was a rainy Saturday morning, and one of the cyclamens in my yard fell. I use cyclamens a lot; I always work with the plants I have here. So the cyclamen on the cover fell from the pot it was in. I said to myself, It’s so beautiful; I should see if I can make the cover design with that. I wanted to take a soft piece of sheer paper from the dictionary and find the word “paper,” but I used the veil on top of it because what does paper really mean? Those are my scissors; that is my thread.

This rough piece on the side is a failed attempt at a Gelli print cyanotype, but I thought My Life in Paper was imperfect, and the colors were right. So I got a stool out, and I found this one rectangle of grayish light on the floor, and I just stood with my big camera and arranged things. I did not do the typography; Kate Nichols of Temple University Press did the interior and typography. That was her first attempt, and it was perfect.

For the interior, I sent them three different sheets of marbleized paper to choose from. In real life, it’s much punchier; it’s more precise. For the chapter divisions, my idea for the book launch was to give everybody a handmade bookmark, which I made with a combination of cyanotype and Gelli. I told Kate Nichols, and she told me to scan them and send them over. We talked about how they might be used. So even though they’re faded, they’re almost positioned where you would slip a bookmark.

In my first conversation with Sean (of Temple University Press), he said, “I can see this book, and it has to be beautiful. It has to be a hardback; it has to have endpapers.” In today’s world, it would have been a $16.99 paperback, but it wouldn’t, as an object, have felt like what I was saying a book is. So they went all out in making it an object, too.

This book holds in it everything that I currently am.

For me, the experience of reading has to be physical; it has to be on paper. I understand the value of eReaders and PDFs, but to enjoy and luxuriate in the words and story that the writer is sharing with you, you owe it to the author to have the container of those words honor them.

I agree with you, even right down to the deckled edge. That’s how paper comes off the mold, and Dard cared a lot about the deckle. I care a lot about the deckle, but it makes a more expensive, therefore a less “successful” book. But, if people were to ask me, “Has this book succeeded?” In my definition, yes, because it’s the book that I wanted it to be. You have to keep your eyes on not what you want but who you are. Who are you as an author?

This book holds in it everything that I currently am. It holds my love for the people in my life; it holds my love for playing with and breaking language, finding raw urgency and truth inside storytelling, and just the art of the book itself.

The post Beth Kephart Pens a Love Letter to Paper Through Her New Memoir appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

To wit:

Thomas Colligan’s cosmically beautiful, playful take on Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, which I’d buy as a poster. 

The delightful type on Holly Gramazio’s Husbands and Shannon Sanders’ Company.

The vibrant jester insanity of Glen James Brown’s Mother Naked (don’t miss that poulaine merging into the ‘a’).

… And on and on.

Too much gets lost in January. So this year, let’s rectify that. 

Here are 15 of our favorite cover reveals/launches of the new year.

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When so much work has been produced, even during a compressed period of time, it’s easy for some winners and losers to fall or be stuffed through the cracks. Below are covers and jackets that have resurfaced. Like the others in POP, this selection represents a range of styles and mannerisms, each an eclectic interpretation of the content.

The post The Daily Heller: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Found appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The storyline follows a long-ago conversation between two gay Latino men, one near death, the other young and eager to learn about life. A 1941 compendium of case studies titled Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns acts as a literary and visual motif. The older man owns a rare edition he’s bequeathing to the younger, two heavily redacted volumes covered with black marks that obliterated the findings, so all that remained were words and phrases like ‘narcissistic,’ ‘tendency to femininity,’ ‘abnormalities,’ and ‘mincing.’ 

The winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, Blackouts is replete with memories, dreams, descriptions of the mental institution where the characters met, family histories, and other references, including French and English literature, the Bible, films, and song lyrics.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), the book has been called “a masterpiece,” “magical,” and “an artwork.” I was privileged to enjoy online conversations with Na Kim, who designed its jacket, cover, and endpapers, and the interior page designer Gretchen Achilles. Both designers worked with Torres, editor Jenna Johnson, and production manager Nina Frieman.

(Conversations edited for clarity and length.)

Ellen Shapiro: First of all, congratulations on the excellent reviews and the National Book Award. To begin, how do you generally approach the design of an illustrated novel?

Na Kim: We get a questionnaire filled out by the author with broad guidelines of what they’d like to see, if there are any visual inspirations for the book, any artwork they’d like us to consider, and what they absolutely don’t want on the cover.

ES: Do the cover designer and the interior book designer work together or independently?

Gretchen Achilles: We work separately (on different production schedules) but often consult each other and try to coordinate design elements when possible and appropriate.

ES: Do you usually present one design or more?

Achilles: For interior designs, we present a set of layouts to the editor and author, showing the front matter and an example of each design element as it will appear in the text. From there, we revise or tweak the design until we have approval from both.

Kim: Some books run through rounds and rounds of designs, and there are others when a single cover is presented with a strong sales pitch. We often present three to five options to the editor, but I find that presenting one with real conviction can be the most successful.

ES: Gretchen, did you research and find the illustrations and photographs? Was there any back-and-forth about which ones to use and where?

Achilles: They were all supplied by Justin Torres, and he determined where they needed to fall in the book. For the redacted pages, he made color photocopies of torn pages from his copy of Sex Variants and made the redactions in Sharpie. We scanned them in-house and manipulated the images to sharpen the text and heighten the contrast so they could be seen as part of the reading text rather than stand-alone art like the photos.

ES: So it’s not true that authors have little or nothing to say about a book’s design. At FSG, how much is the author involved? 

Achilles: The author is involved as much as they want to be. We are an author-centric house. We incorporate suggestions and advise on the best ways to visually achieve what they are looking for. Justin was very involved.

ES: Justin, did you need to get permission for every piece? Looking at the three pages of illustration credits, that must have been quite an endeavor. 

Justin Torres: Getting permissions for the images was insane. I didn’t know anything about how complicated the process would be. I had to hire a freelance editor to help hunt down the permiss images; some are from children’s books illustrated by one of the characters, Zhenya Gay, others are from Sex Variants, some are photos by Thomas Painter, another character in the book, whose archive is at the Kinsey Institute. Other images are personal.

ES: Was there any pushback about male frontal nudes?

Torres: Not at all. My editor is the best, and her constant refrain was, ‘Make the kind of book you need to make; let me worry about the rest.’ If there was any internal pushback, she didn’t mention it. We had some conversations about why certain images were important, and we definitely made a lot of jokes about just how many penises are in the book.

ES: Let’s talk about the redacted pages from Sex Variants. Was there a method for choosing which lines of text to black out and which to leave in? 

Torres: Each blackout poem had its own method. For one, I focused on the word ‘to,’ transforming the text into a kind of ode. For another, I focused on reducing the language to simple first-person declarations: ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Another focused on internal rhyme. I varied my approach with each blackout.

ES:  The New York Times Book Review chose Blackouts as one of the year’s most notable book covers. Tell us about the black gloss rectangle on the dust jacket.

Torres: When asked to describe my ideal cover, I said something like, ‘All black, only my name and the name of the book in embossed gold lettering.’ I wanted the cover to recall the original Sex Variants book, which my novel circles around: all black with gold titling.

The brilliance of Na’s design is that it’s the exact shape of one of the erasure poem images. I recognized the shape instantly and just loved it. The rectangle-with-one-torn-edge is the shape of the torn page that recurs throughout Blackouts. I made those erasures myself by photocopying the Sex Variants pages and tearing the photocopy to make it appear as if it had been torn from the book itself. I’m not sure how many readers realize the source of the shape on the cover; it’s a subtle connection. 

Kim: The black-on-black also nods to the stories within the stories, shadows existing in the dark. The peeking hyena is pulled from the illustrated children’s book within the novel.

ES: Justin, do you have a special relationship with or feelings about the hyena? What does the animal mean to you?

Torres: Impersonating the hyena’s laugh functions as a queer cry of recognition, a code, so certain characters can recognize one another.

ES: Is there a reason the typeface used for the chapter titles and initial caps isn’t on the cover or jacket?

Achilles: I chose Poster Bodoni, with its ‘censored’ rubber-stamp look yet classic literary feel that would marry well with the Adobe Caslon text. It’s heavier than the font Na used on the cover so that it would drop out of the solid torn rectangles.

ES: How did the choice of brown ink on cream stock come about?

Achilles: That’s a long story! Justin and Jenna wanted the book to have black text and sepia-toned images. I suggested doing it as a two-color job, black and dark gold Pantone 124U ink. We made duotones with the two inks to create a sepia tone, kept the text black, and used the gold in accents like the drop caps. Nina ran estimates every which way, but the book was not making margin (that is, keeping production costs in line). We could make margin with a lower-grade paper, so we settled on that, but when we were routing the page proofs, Jenna looked at me and asked, “Is this book really going to look good on this paper?” And I had to admit that I’d never run a two-color job on that kind of paper. So Nina and I reviewed the pages with redacted text and concluded that the [lower-grade] paper wouldn’t hold the detail. We returned to the higher quality, smoother, cream-colored sheet we’d originally wanted—the paper we stock for poetry titles and books with art that can carry the extra cost. On that paper, dropping the second ink, the book made margin. Jenna didn’t want to lose the sepia-colored images, so I suggested printing in one color, a deep brown (Pantone 2322U), so the text would be dark enough to be legible and so we could manipulate the images to create the ghostly sepia feel the author wanted. All the printer had to do was clean the press and replace the black ink with the Pantone color, and we wouldn’t have to pay for a two-color job. FSG is a smaller house, and we have smaller budgets.

ES: Thank you for sharing insights into what most graphic designers used to do, specifying ink on paper. In-house designers often get short shrift. I sometimes hear comments like, “When there’s a really great project, we send it out.” What are the plusses of being an in-house designer?

Kim: We’re pretty democratic regarding who gets to work on ‘big’ or ‘fun’ titles. Each of us has individual strengths and talents, and we work hard to make sure that everyone in our department of four gets an opportunity to work on a title they’re excited about. The plus-plus of being in-house is the relationships we build with our authors and editors. There’s a lot of trust. If there’s negative feedback, it’s easier to take when you know and like the person behind the remarks. It allows for more clarity and understanding about why something does or doesn’t work. 

Achilles: The biggest plus is that you are part of a team working in different ways for a book to succeed. Here at FSG, a smaller company, the publisher and editors make you a part of something we’re all doing together. The important thing we do is create a mood and support the text in a visual way that helps the reader make sense of it. The text is the star. The most successful designs are ones you don’t notice because they’re in service of the text rather than distracting from it.

ES: When you go on speaking tours and give interviews, do journalists and reviewers usually ask questions about the design?

Torres: I get a ton of compliments on the cover, but not really in the form of interview questions. The interior design comes up quite a bit, though. The brown ink really makes an impression on people. It’s so unusual for a novel not to be printed in black and white. No one asks such design-specific questions, but they do wonder why it was important to me to create such a stylish, visual book.

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Wholly subjective? Yes! Utterly brilliant and inspiring literary eye candy? With hope, also yes.

Dig in and enjoy—and afterward, for the best book covers that you didn’t see in 2023, click here.

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For Edel Rodriguez politics is personal. As a child, he and his family fled Castro’s Cuba as part of the Mariel boatlift. Once settled in Miami, a young Rodriguez became fascinated with the Bill of Rights in school. His first adult job was working the New York Times op-ed page. As an illustrator, Rodriguez has always been in the business of political commentary, speaking truth to power through his art.

His truth unfolds in Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey.

The Cuban dictatorship was great about sending the ‘right’ kind of propaganda out into the world. I hope my book dispels some of this. A ‘hero’ like Che can be someone else’s oppressor.

Edel Rodriguez

Debbie Millman’s and Steven Heller’s recent conversation with Rodriguez covered a lot of ground, from how he devised Worm’s visual language to the reclaiming of a derogatory term as the title to the deeper philosophical reasons for why this book (and why now). Rodriguez also delves into the parallels between the Cuban Revolution and the January 6th insurrection. As for a future film adaptation (we’re calling it here!), he’d cast Pedro Pascale as his father.

If you missed the livestream, register here to watch the episode.

Don’t own a copy of Worm? You can order one here.

The post Illustrating Truth to Power: PRINT Book Club Recap with Edel Rodriguez appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Today, designers and art directors are turning out rich cover work at an alacritous clip, and while it collectively shapes publishing’s future, so much of it vividly draws from or reinterprets the past—especially that halcyon “golden age” of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Which we’re absolutely loving.

Some highlights this month:

• Wendy Copy’s work has always been a seemingly effortless blend of simplicity and profundity—and the cover for The Orange (a collection of her most popular poems) serves as a genius mirror to that fact.
• Matt Broughton created a sublime blend of past and present in Vintage Classics’ reissue of Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers, paying homage to the original lettering of the 1974 first U.S. edition.
• When it comes to creating a jacket for a lost novel by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, you’d better bring it. And Jon Gray did for Gabriel García Márquez’s Until August. (So much that even though we missed it last month, we’re including it here.)

And the full list of our favorite covers published or revealed in November …

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The London-based Boris is as taken by physical mediums as I, primarily working in silkscreen, sculpture, book, and letterpress. She continues her exploration of these proclivities with Rainbow, which features seven layered pieces of paper that gradually form the arches of a rainbow as the pages turn.

The only difference between Rainbow 1 and Rainbow 2 is the colorways featured, with Rainbow 1 composed of bright hues as they appear in nature and Rainbow 2 exhibiting pastels. The two versions came about when Boris made the book prototype from leftover paper samples she had on hand in her studio while under pandemic lockdown in 2020. During the process, she felt compelled to propose two different color palettes. The two versions can be experienced independently of one another or as a set, with Rainbow 1 seen as the classic and Rainbow 2 as its more interpretive counterpart. Both are made from a range of Japanese papers by Takeo.

To fully understand and experience the wordless books, you must hold them and turn the pages. Both Rainbow 1 and Rainbow 2 have been released in an edition of 222 and are available for purchase in Korea, Germany, the US, and online. Boris is also converting the book into an exhibition, which will be on view in France first in March and April and then again in May and June. This exhibition interpretation will feature the book, 48 modular color pencil drawings, a series of sculptures, and a new, unbound edition. Boris is hopeful the exhibition will soon find a home in the US as well.

In the age of all things digital, virtual, and AI, Rainbow is a refreshing reminder that the physicality of the book form still reigns supreme.  

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