Category: Book Covers
Feb 19, 2012 | Book Covers, Recent Posts
Title design by Iskra, a mix of Gothic and Uncial pen calligraphy
Drawn typographic lettering design by Iskra
Title and Author lettering design by Iskra
The Imajica letterforms were designed by me as a proprietary style to be used in Clive Barker's books over a period of time. They were then lifted and turned into a font for general use by another designer without my knowledge or permission, a perplexing and less than gallant appropriation of one artist's works by another.
See more book cover title lettering at Iskra Design.
Feb 19, 2012 | Book Covers, Recent Posts
I do title and author design for many books by romance authors. These recent covers for Karen Robards and Danielle Steele are a good match of lettering style with other visual elements.
Title and author calligraphy by Iskra, Art Director Lisa Litwack
Title calligraphy and lettering design by Iskra, Art Director Lynn Andreozzi
Feb 6, 2012 | Book Covers, Recent Posts
What I like about book title design is the variety of skills I get to use. It's not just about pens and brushes and lettering techniques. Each genre of book requires a different expression of historical era and a feel for the part of popular (or elite) culture the book lives in. These examples of book title and author typography are all based on traditional historical letterforms.
"Juliet" is Humanist, with a flourish. Alexandra Ripley's "Love Divine" is a very condensed and stylized version of Uncial. "The Lost Recipe for Happiness" is a nostalgic mix of small caps with ornamental italic accents. "Nelson's Trafalgar" incorporates a hand-drawn cartouche with a script that is more font than calligraphy, although it is completely hand-lettered.
The childrens' and fantasy genre books below draw from historical sources also, but with subtle differences. Each cover treatment should look unique to the author, and the typography and hand-lettering become important parts of the author and series brand. "Babe" is done with a calligraphy pen on rough paper, which gives it a soft look that goes with the sweetness of the cover colors and the rounded animal shapes. "The Knight" started as calligraphic Roman Caps but was then inked and given a more retro-typographic feeling, enhanced by the outline. The bolder serifs give it a masculine and heroic feeling echoed in the illustration.
Additional samples of the Uncial style showing how differently it can be expressed. For Brian Jaques (yes, you can fall in love with a mouse!) the ornamental serifs and quirky curves go with Martin the Warrior's character and mimic the ornamental border. "Son of the Sword" is closest to a purely historical Uncial of any of these titles, done with an edged pen on rough paper. The Uncial d is one of my favorite letters of all time.
Hand lettering and hand lettered typography © Iskra Johnson
See my book jacket portfolio at www.iskradesign.com
Dec 14, 2011 | Book Covers
A recent spate of articles about the resurgence of interest in real hold-in-your hand books warms my heart. Whenever I think of December at its center is the image of The Beloved Book Store, warm, glowing, full of promise, and the hours I spend there browsing, dreaming in fiction, and studying book and cover design.
Here is an excerpt from yesterday’s New York Times article “E-Books, Shmee-Books: Readers Return to the Stores:”
Facing economic gloom and competition from cheap e-readers, brick-and-mortar booksellers entered this holiday season with the humblest of expectations.
But the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders, the chain that went out of business this year.
Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, said that comparable store sales this Thanksgiving weekend increased 10.9 percent from that period last year. The American Booksellers Association, a trade group for independents, said last week that members saw a sales jump of 16 percent in the week including Thanksgiving, compared with the same period a year ago.
At the R. J. Julia bookstore in Madison, Conn., sales of adult trade books in November rose 30 percent over last year, said Roxanne J. Coady, the owner.
I am sorry to see Borders leave the scene, but it looks to be a huge boon to the small independent book seller. Here is a recent Random House cover, for which I created custom typography. The subtle ones are often the hardest to do. Sometimes the job of typography is to be very quiet, almost invisible…..but just right.
May 3, 2011 | Book Covers, Recent Posts
When the art director at Penguin USA called to ask me to write the word “Zen” for a book called Zen and the Art of Making a Living it couldn’t have come at a better time. I was at that very moment sitting on my meditation cushion in a corner of my office contemplating The Emptiness after finishing several advertising campaigns, and I had nothing on my calendar. Although I felt cold terror at the prospect of this little three letter word, a word that conjured centuries of calligraphy masters in their robes and sandals not to mention the three sensei I had studied with, I said “Sure.” And then I said to myself, as I gathered up a dozen brushes and pens and stacks of paper, “It can’t be any harder than that other three-letter word, “new.”
Stones and metal weight used to keep fragile rice paper from lifting
At that time I was still grinding my own ink, using a traditional inkstone. Now for most brushwork I use Moon Palace Ink which I get from John Neal Books, although I sometimes grind ink from a stick and mix it with liquid ink for certain very absorbent papers.
Inkstone and traditional sumi ink.
The ink must be tested out many times to see how black it is, blotted and tried on different papers, with different brushes, as each one gives a different effect. I also use pens, which give a different character entirely.
Automatic pen, oldstyle ruling pen, edged pen, new ruling pen, steel brush
As I work I am designing in the moment with the gesture of the brush. I try to remain intuitive and kinesthetic, feeling the drag of the ink and the paper and experimenting with the invisible element of calligraphy: time. How fast or slow you move the brush completely transforms the stroke. Design, however, includes inconvenient facts like the resemblance of a “Z” to a “2” and psychological factors: should the word feel elegant and disciplined? artful? playful? ordinary? I keep all this into account as well as the history of western calligraphic forms and the basic styles of shodo. The final style that was chosen for the title is based on a hybrid of “bone” and “clerical” styles of Chinese calligraphy. The book is now in its fifth printing, but has kept the same title throughout.
Photographs and calligraphy © 2011 Iskra Johnson
Designer, calligrapher, lettering artist. 