Working on an updated cover for Ben Jacks’ forthcoming book A House and its Atmosphere via Culicidae Architectural Press with a blurb by David Leatherbarrow, Professor and Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
Client: Culicidae Architectural Press
Project: Book Cover
Final version of cover as published.
This summer we were tasked by Culicidae Press to design a cover for a forthcoming book by Rachel Odhner Longstaff called In the Shadow of the Dragon’s Back: A Young American Girl in South Africa During the Early Years of Apartheid. The book is a memoir about Longstaff growing up in Durban, on the east coast of KwaZulu Natal between 1948 and 1960, before returning to the US. The book’s title comes from the Drakensberg which is shaped not unlike the back of a dragon.
After a series of cover iterations using some of the photographs that appear in the book, we settled—with the author’s input—on a colorized version of a black-and-white photo taken by Longstaff’s brother Pehr Hemming Odhner, that shows her sister Kirstin on horseback facing the Dragon’s Back.
Client: Culicidae Press, LLC and Rachel Odhner Longstaff
Timeline: two months
Culicidae Architectural Press is releasing a new English edition of Francesco Careri’s classic Walkscapes: Walking as An Aesthetic Practice this fall, and we were asked to design the interior and the cover. The book was republished in Spanish in 2012, and the original bilingual English/Spanish edition is no longer in print. The book is both text- and image-heavy, so we decided to use one of the interior images on the preliminary cover.
Client: Culicidae Architectural Press
This was a difficult cover to design. The author, Kristene E. Friday (pseudonym), whose book will be published through Culicidae Press, was sexually abused as a child but suppressed the memories until she was forty-nine years old and had a breakdown. In the text she describes her emotional state vividly, and based on some of the mental images I put together a collage of relevant photographs to create the cover.
Client: Culicidae Press, LLC
Version 1
For Hog Press we were tasked to design a book cover for a book by Vermont-based author Joseph D. Reich’s intriguingly titled How To Order Chinese During A Hostage Crisis: Dialects, Existential Essays, A Play, And Other Poems, to be published this summer.
I prefer the red one but the author had his eye on the one with the drawing, no doubt in part because his son did the drawing;–) The third version shows one of the last Robert Taylor homes being destroyed in Chicago a few years ago while I was driving to Michigan with an old friend from Hyde Park.
Client: Hog Press and author Joseph D. Reich
Here are two ads I put together for The Scriblerian and the Wordsworth Circle to advertise Richard Brantley’s Transatlantic Trio book. It’s suprising how photogenious a book looks in the morning sun in Iowa outside the Culicidae Press offices…
Client: Culicidae Press, LLC, Ames, Iowa
Version 1
I’ve been working on the cover design for David Dutton’s forthcoming book Paid in Sunsets: A Park Ranger’s Story (to be published this fall by Culicidae Press), and here are some early versions (ugly babies)…
Here’s the cover for Jan Dale’s forthcoming book (via the independent Family Success Press) One Giant Psychological Leap for Humankind. Jan is a retired psychologist who earned a Ph.D. from Boston University and then returned to his home state of Iowa where he began working as the Chief Psychologist for the Central Iowa Mental Health Center in Ames, Iowa. The book will be published some time this Fall or early Winter. For more information go to www.familysuccesspress.com
I also designed the logo for the Family Success Press (see below):
Just finished the initial version of a new book cover for Jonathan P. Coron’s Survival Manual for Substitute Teachers, to be published by Hog Press some time this fall. Other iterations to follow soon…
Just finished a book design (interior and cover) for a Phenix Books publication by Catherine Miller. The author wrote an auto/biography about her relationship with her autistic brother. She wanted to have photographs of her brother on the cover. After initially working with grayscale images I decided to colorize several of the photographs. In consultation with the author we also went initially overboard with the number of images, then pulled back and ended up using only three images.