May 23, 2016

THE GUSTAV SONATA - Rose Tremain

For the new Rose Tremain novel, we asked Bobby Evans at Telegramme to create an illustration based on 1940s sheet music covers. We were so pleased with the results, we decided to make a short papercut animation inspired by the final book jacket.

(Source: youtube.com)

May 20, 2016

JOHN AUBREY: MY OWN LIFE - Ruth Scurr / AUBREY’S BRIEF LIVES - John Aubrey

John Aubrey: My Own Life and Aubrey’s Brief Lives provide comprehensive and immersive accounts into the life of 17th Century philosopher and writer John Aubrey.

Although an alternative direction was eventually chosen for the covers of the two books - Aubrey’s Brief Lives incorporates a reproduction of John Aubrey’s bookplate - we like to give some insight into the work in progress stages behind creating some of our covers on the blog. The concept for the books originally involved use of the linocutting technique; shown here with the designer working an image into a linoleum surface, inking the sheet with a roller and then impressing the image onto paper.

Both books published by Vintage Classics are available now.

May 12, 2016

THIS TOO SHALL PASS - Milena Busquets

A lively, sexy, honest, and moving novel set on the idyllic Spanish coast,Shocked at the unexpected loss of her mother, the most important person in her life, Bianca suddenly realises that she has no idea what her future will look like. Wryly funny, wistfully romantic, grief-stricken, and raw, This Too Shall Pass is at once an unforgettable meditation on loss and on love.

The cover shows a photograph by Ferdinando Scianna, a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos co-operative.

The lettering is by Lily Jones and is inspired twentieth–century Spanish art.

This Too Shall Pass is published by Harvill Secker

May 10, 2016

THE PIER FALLS - Mark Haddon

This is a continuation of our discussion with Mark on his illustrative process for his latest book The Pier Falls.

What was the most difficult subject matter to represent, and why?

These pictures were all done using a bamboo stylus and photoshop elements,
a technique i’ve used in various ways, including a couple of portraits. Here’s a picture of the writer / illustrator ted dewan, for example (top photo). But i’ve used pencil, gouache, lino, etching, acrylic paints and collage. I’ve never felt at home with oils and charcoal is * way * too messy.

Do you feel that composing your illustrations is in anyway akin to composing your words?

They feel like very different kinds of activities but the processes are similar in one vital respect. Both work only if you constantly stand back and try to look at your work with the eyes of complete stranger and ask yourself, brutally, ‘does this move me? does this entertain me?’

Which of the illustration in The Pier Falls is your favourite and why?

There is a picture of weir machinery which is very close to my heart (bottom photo).

Reflecting on the finished illustrations, does it make you re-evaluate the story?

No, but it does give me great pleasure when i leaf through the illustrated edition,
partly because it is, i think, a lovely object in and of itself and partly because it’s a celebration of the physical book in general. Paradoxically, the drawings were done largely on a screen but the finished object is something which only works when you’re holding it in your hand. Long live paper and ink…

 The Pier Falls was published by Jonathan Cape on Thursday 5th May

May 9, 2016

THE PIER FALLS - Mark Haddon

Mark shared a glimpse of his process for the illustrations in The Pier Falls.

The detail is extraordinary. These illustrations must take you a long
time. How do you set about your illustrations? Do you sketch quick layout first?

The illustrations come from a longstanding habit of mine of making ‘joiners’,
those photo collages david hockney pioneered and made for a long period
in which he stitched together many pictures to create a panoramic home-made fish-eye lens effect. Above (top photo) is one of my two sons during our visit
to the british columbia museum of anthropology.

The illustrations in the pier falls are very careful copies - sometimes tracings - of composite photographs made of up to sixty different images, and half the work was getting that photographic image exactly right so that it seemed both graphically loose and structurally believable at the same time. that took almost as much time as the drawing, not least because i threw away many possible designs (i have a lot of composite photos of weirs…).

Did you have an illustration in mind whilst you were writing or did they
come after?

One of the illustrations - the skip in a side street  - predates the book
and i think it was this image which suggested the idea to me. Some of the photographic sources also predate the book but they seemed to fit the book’s theme even when the link isn’t obvious. There’s a drawing, for an example, of a concrete blast wall which only readers with an obsessive interest in cold war military history will be able to identify as a blast wall from the now-abandoned thor missile launch site at what was once raf harrington (bottom photo). My father was in the royal engineers and surveyed the site before its construction and suffered severe moral queasiness about it. I love the bleakness of the image, the unspoken backstory and the sheer gorgeousness of old concrete.

This is one of the reasons why i don’t think of the pictures as illustrations per se. They don’t illustrate the stories in the collection. And though there are obvious links it should be impossible for a reader to map each story onto a specific pictures. How about ‘complementary artwork’? If anyone can think of a less clumsy way of saying that then they should let me know.

Read on for more of Mark’s discussion on his illustrations in tomorrow’s CMYK post. The Pier Falls was published by Jonathan Cape on Thursday 5th May

May 5, 2016

THE PIER FALLS - Mark Haddon

An expedition to Mars goes terribly wrong. A thirty-stone man is confined to his living room. One woman is abandoned on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. The Pier Falls is the first collection of stories by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The cover incorporates deckchair canvas supplied by The Stripes Company, Chester. The deckchair pattern and colours hint at the title story where a seaside pier collapses. The graphic stripes compliment the linear illustrations through out the books, that were illustrated by Mark Haddon.

I asked Mark some questions about his illustrations such as…

The detail is extraordinary. These illustrations must take you a long
time. How do you set about your illustrations? Do you sketch quick layout first?

Do you feel that composing your illustrations is in anyway akin to composing your words?

Read his responses and get a glimpse into his process over the next few days here at CMYK.

The Pier Falls is published by Jonathan Cape on Thursday 5th May

May 5, 2016

Birds and the Bees - Various authors

Enjoy the sights and sounds of the English countryside…

(Source: youtube.com)

May 3, 2016
WIND/PINBALL 3D EDITION - Haruki Murakami
Today Vintage release a special 3D paperback edition of Haruki Murakami’s first two novels - Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973.
We commissioned La Boca to illustrate Wind /Pinball. A pair of 3D glasses are...

WIND/PINBALL 3D EDITION - Haruki Murakami

Today Vintage release a special 3D paperback edition of Haruki Murakami’s first two novels - Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973.

We commissioned La Boca to illustrate Wind /Pinball. A pair of 3D glasses are stuck to the inside cover. The cover works as stereoscopic 3D images by simply dictating the position of red and blue within the illustration. This makes the image receed or come out of the page, allowing the viewer to physically interact with the 3D cover.

Available exclusively at Waterstones, the special paperback edition features sprayed edges, a 3D cover and 3D glasses and is priced at £8.99.

Apr 28, 2016

BIRDS AND THE BEES - Various authors

Timorous Beasties have collaborated with Vintage to produce a series of five books on Nature writing.

Timorous Beasties were established in 1990 by Glasgow School of Art graduates, Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons. Noted for their unique and provocative textiles, their work has been described as “ William Morris on acid” or “Damien Hirst on Ovaltine”. Bright, bold, surreal and highly detailed their patterns have a chic irreverence. Traditionally, wallpaper patterns have romanticised nature. Timorous Beasties work subverts this. Close inspection reveals a web of ornate detail filled with surprising and sinister surprises, like the dead bird in the hawk’s claws.

The design of a simple san serif panel enables the elaborate illustration to take centre stage. The illustration spills over onto the flaps which align with the vibrant endpapers.

We asked Paul Simmons about his work on the project:

Can you explain your illustration process?

The process I always use, which is the most basic way of drawing, is to hand draw black onto white paper. After that, I then scan the drawings into the computer. Nothing fancy. I then separate the drawing from the white, and piece the different bits together, then colour them up, it can all take rather a long time. We had a pretty clear idea for the background for all the books, and it was going to work very much like some of our wallpapers, where there are different repeats at different scales of pattern. This allowed us to create the full design for the cover, getting less busy on the flaps and endpapers (the inside of the cover). It is easier to work with the drawings on the computer, in case you need to re-do, or trace what you have done. People tend to think of computers as taking away from one’s ‘creativity’, but computers are just another tool, and they don’t make you any less creative.

How did you decide what colours were what books?

For colouring the books, I just coloured according to what felt right. So yellow for the bees relates to their colouring and also to honey; the goshawk and its steely grey colouring, and cold calculating ruthless killing, are echoed in the grey-blue background of H is for Hawk.

What do you use as reference for the birds and bees?

I have always had a bit of a thing for our feathered friends, and so over the years I have collected lots of reference books, but my main reference was from the series’ on Natural History by Lisars, a printer originally based in Edinburgh, around the 1840’s. They started working with James John Audubon on the ‘Birds of America’, (although it ended up being printed in France), the tiny hand coloured, beautifully printed plates, were a great inspiration. I think I enjoyed working on the goshawk most – it’s such a majestic bird.

Was there anything different about working on a book jacket design?

It was great working on book jackets, it’s different in that you need to get a feel for the book. The aesthetic has to work in quite a different way, it has to give the atmosphere, have impact and at the same time be rather small! Also working on a series, we had to find a way to bring these five very different books together.

The Birds and the Bees series of books are published by Vintage Classics on May 5th.

Apr 15, 2016

MIN: The New Simplicity in Graphic Design - Stuart Tolley

Thames & Hudson have just published a new visual culture book by Stuart Tolley (creative director of Transmission).

MIN highlights the rebirth of simplicity in graphic design, and showcases around 160 outstanding minimalist designers working across a wide range of formats and media. Only the finest international examples from the last three years are featured and includes work by Non-Format. Farrow, Stockholm Design Lab, Wang Zhi-Hong, Rumors, and D8 (with Noma Bar). 

Between the covers of this beautifully produced book, you will also find The Metaphysics of Ping-Pong, a book jacket designed by one of the cmyk team, and published by Yellow Jersey.

Apr 14, 2016

SUDDEN DEATH - Álvaro Enrigue

A brutal tennis match in Rome. Two formidable opponents: the wild Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games.

Photographed by Mark Vessey, the cover shows Real Tennis balls in their unfinished state before the felt is sewn round them. The balls were kindly supplied by The Queen’s Club, London, who showed us round the Real Tennis courts and explained the intricacies of this historic game. They also showed us how the balls are made.  

The title type was hand-drawn by the designer based on sixteenth-century script.

Sudden Death is published by Harvill Secker

Apr 13, 2016

TODAY WE DIE A LITTLE - Richard Askwith

Five Olympic medals. 18 World Records. Emil Zátopek revolutionised distance running in the years after WWII. His toughness was matched by a spirit of friendship and joie de vivre that transcended the darkest days of the Cold War. 

When Russia moved to crush the Prague Spring of 1968, Zátopek paid a heavy price for his stance as the champion of ‘socialism with a human face’, and was sentenced to years of manual labour, far from his home and adored wife - a forgotten man.

Richard Askwith’s Today We Die A Little tells this deeply moving and heroic story.

Zátopek is a name that deserves celebrating, hence we’ve taken the unusual step of leading with the case design. The cover design and typography was inspired by mid-twentieth century European poster design, and hopefully embodies the spirit and energy of one of the true great Olympians.

Today We Die A Little is published by Yellow Jersey Press this month.

Apr 11, 2016
AND THE WEAK SUFFER WHAT THEY MUST? - Yanis Varoufakis
In this dramatic narrative of Europe’s economic rise and spectacular fall, Yanis Varoufakis shows that the origins of the recent collapse go far deeper than our leaders are prepared to admit -...

AND THE WEAK SUFFER WHAT THEY MUST? - Yanis Varoufakis

In this dramatic narrative of Europe’s economic rise and spectacular fall, Yanis Varoufakis shows that the origins of the recent collapse go far deeper than our leaders are prepared to admit - and that we have done nothing so far to fix them.

Drawing on personal experience of his own negotiations with the eurozone’s financiers and offering concrete policies and alternatives, Varoufakis shows how we concocted this mess and how we can get out of it. And The Weak Suffer What They Must? reminds us of our history in order to save European capitalism from itself.

Read an extract and watch an exclusive talk from Yanis Varoufakis here.

Published now by The Bodley Head

Apr 8, 2016

THE COMET SEEKERS - Helen Sedgwick

Róisín and François first meet in the snowy white expanse of Antarctica. Their shared desire to explore the world has brought them here, but to do so both have left family and loved ones behind.

As we loop back through their lives, glimpsing each of them only when a comet is visible in the skies above, we see how their paths cross as they come closer and closer to this moment. Theirs are stories filled with love and hope and heartbreak, that show how strangers can be connected and ghosts can be real, and the world can be as lonely or as beautiful as the comets themselves.

The Bayeux Tapestry plays a significant part in the story so we felt embroidery was the perfect medium for our jacket design. We commissioned Chloe Giordano to create the artwork, and asked her to depict François and his mother beneath a sky full of celestial activity. The comets on the jacket are inspired by old astronomical diagrams, including Halley’s Comet which appears throughout the story.

Chloe kindly took photos of the embroidery throughout the process. You can see more of her beautiful work here

The Comet Seekers is published by Harvill Secker in August 2016

Apr 7, 2016

The Blade Artist - Irvine Welsh

Francis Begbie returns – a little older and much wiser.
But has the Begbie from Trainspotting disappeared forever?
The Blade Artist
will tell all…

With a design featuring the brilliant photography of Sam Barker, The Blade Artist marks the return of one of contemporary fiction’s most terrifying characters.

It is published this month by Jonathan Cape.

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