I’m guessing that designing book covers is such a coveted activity for certain designers because with each cover you’re tasked with, you’re given an opportunity to re-invent your process over and over again. Different subjects, different authors and different writing styles demand treatments that don’t look like one another and each time you get to do one, if you’re game, you push yourself in whatever different direction is needed to best reflect or hint at the contents of the book therein. Much like a sedentary, often desk-bound version of Evel Knievel, designing a book on a subject matter outside your comfort zone essentially dares you to see how far you can push your abilities and how well you can absorb the material to make the best possible visual interpretation of that material for the jacket. I love such dares.

You also sometimes get a chance to work together with some impressive photographers and/or illustrators and/or custom letterers. During such introductions, my brain is often quick to take a dramatically distant leap to that early scene from Goodfellas in which Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and Tommy (Joe Pesci) are introduced to one another as teens. They’ve only just met one another, and none of the damage to follow has been even hinted at yet, but you just know they’re going to wreck havoc on everything they do and everyone they see. While designing a book jacket on a typical day rarely involves stabbing a protected mobster and later exhuming his corpse or pistol-whipping an out-of-line neighbor, my imagination is quick to indulge what kind of pictorial trouble two craftspeople can get into when tasked with sharing an assignment. I need to get out sometimes.

On one recent job I worked on for Penguin, creative director Paul Buckley paired me up with photographer Marc Yankus to work on a cover for a book called Somebody Else’s Daughter by Elizabeth Brundage (who also wrote this book) that’s coming out next year. The story concerns a social and psychological unraveling at a well-to-do prep school. Marc’s images are exceedingly effective at capturing a sustained sense of the ominous. He’s lent his stamp to many a book jacket, theater poster and CD, but my favorite instances of his work were on the covers of Fury by Salman Rushdie and Slack Jaw by Jim Knipfel, so I was fired up to be given the chance to attempt design justice to some of his photos. As his photos are so purposely faded and blurry and since one of the central themes of the book is the image of a clean, pristine family having its flaws steadily exposed, I felt that it made the most sense for the type to be clean, crisp and in a solid color, thereby defining the contrast between what we see on the surface of things in the book’s beginning and the murkiness and ambiguity that is later revealed.

The first two above are from the initial set of comps we submitted with the male figure in the foreground, referencing the father of Somebody Else’s Daughter. Following that round, the editors requested that a girl be used in place of the father figure in the photo and that a more commercial type approach be used with the new photo. These edits were fair enough, so we set back to work respectively and when Marc had new images, I had new type treatments and new comps (below are 2 of approximately 7):

These went over somewhat well, but everyone agreed that we still wanted to keep digging for a more perfect fit. After this round, we began playing around more and more with a hand scrawled type treatment that I threw in on a lark during the first round of comps. Paul & I resurrected it and fashioned a few more. These last two hand scripts were written with a leaky pen on a Greyhound bus on the NJ Turnpike which gave it a jerkiness and abandon that the type was now following suit with the feel of the images, rather than purposely working against them.

Ultimately, as is often the case, this direction for the jacket was ultimately axed and the project adapted a different approach with a different crew. We carry on, seeking out the next assignment that can masquerade as its own personal dare to press one’s abilities. It should also be noted that in the event of being dismissed from a particular assignment, one arguably does better to abandon the Goodfellas approach to design and instead adapt the tact of that gentleman from another one of Scorcese’s movies. I’m talking about the one about Buddhism.