Letterforms and illustration © Iskra Design
Asian-inspired brush work can be used to create distinctive brandmarks in packaging, in editorial illustration, graphic identities and publishing. These are a few examples of different techniques, some done with brush and some with a pen, that all come from training in sumi-e.
Cleaning out the flat files is not always pure procrastination. Today I unearthed this cover for the recently departed and oh so fabulous Liz Taylor. I won't tell you how many times I wrote this three-letter word……Art Director, StevenBrower, photographer Paul Hesse, for Birch Lane Press.
This book title for Ballantine was a subtle challenge. We needed a style of writing that expressed Ashley Judd's femininity and popular appeal while suggesting a wistful and authentic voice. The book is surprising and real and very hearfelt, and covers the actress' activism and social justice work as well as her personal life history. Many different brushes were tried to create an effective casual script. One of the trickiest tools, surprisingly, is a soft felt-tip marker. They are unpredicatble, and the point can change every few minutes as it softens with time and use. I was pleased with how this turned out.
Recently I had the challenging experience of working on cover designs for David Brooks' new book The Social Animal. The book does not fit into any neat genre categories, and this is the hardest kind of book to create an image identity for. Although the book features a man and woman who meet, fall in love and go through life together it is not a romance. Nor is it a straight sociology book, although it concerns the intersection of mind-science and social reality; nor is it a self-help book, although it focuses on success in life and how people achieve it. David Brooks' reputation is not particularly "sexy" but this was not a dry book, and the cover needed to have emotional warmth and popular appeal that could reach a broader audience than the readers of the New York Times editorial page.
Hmmmmm……
Random House sent me the last idea they had developed, showing a man and woman in silhouette facing each other at a table, with the title in formal script typography. The direction was fairly open: do something different, better, that somehow captures this non-genre-genre. Figures, but maybe not figures exactly. Make it look smart, but not intellectual. And come up with something in 24 hours. I love this kind of assignment. It's a little bit like gambling, as your chances of winning the round are very low. The house is stacked with a whole lot of ambiguity and the hidden sword of author approval. There is nothing to lose and so I try to have fun and push for really creative solutions.
I explored several more versions than you see here, but these were the basic directions and styles. I tried a contemporary pop-culture face motif that would speak to the emotions, with warm-lovey-colors, and also a more sophisticated look using my variation on the universal symbols for man and woman to suggest courtship without the schmaltz. The signage motif seemed appropriate for a book that talked about paths to success through life and methods of emotional navigation. There is also a certain chilliness in the universal symbols that expressed the archetypal form of Brooks' characters, who are not meant to be taken seriously as characters in a novel. In the mix was an organic brush-drawn figure icon which, when multiplied, suggested the bigger mass of society. Although none of my solutions were chosen a variation on the idea of multiple figures became the final cover by Beck Stvan and Ruby Levesque. The solutions below use my own hand lettering, painted backgrounds, illustration and photography. Existing fonts are used in some solutions.
All cover designs © Iskra Design
These two books by Mary Balogh have been on the best seller list in recent weeks. Here I created the title lettering for art director Lynn Andreozzi at Random House. Lynn is wonderful to work with: she has a great eye for type, and the covers I do with her are always tasteful and beautiful. Illustration for this series by Herman Estevez.
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