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