BANK
Alex’s cover really captured the spirit of the book—it was kind of quirky and had a lot of energy. There’s just something about that solitary figure: even from behind, you can tell she’s happy—joyful and maybe goofy. Plus, I would definitely wear what she’s wearing. When the book came out it felt like everything lined up. Everyone at Penguin came out and helped the book succeed. But I don’t think anything helped it more than the cover. I know at Penguin, the word they used was “iconic.” You can never, ever hope for a cover that good.
ELLENBERG
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
PENGUIN, 2014
SCRIBNER, 2012
NONFIC TION
NONFIC TION
Accounts of the ways math is practiced and advanced through “real-world” applications AUTHOR Jordan Ellenberg DESIGNER Adly Elewa (BFA 2011 Graphic Design), freelance designer What appeals to me about designing book covers is that you work on every single piece of them. Execution-wise, it’s all your hand. Each cover is a chance to show what you can do as a designer. I came up with a few options for this one. One of the alternates I liked had more of a bulls-eye target, with a chalkboard covered with equations showing through the rings of the target. It was like a Jasper Johns type of thing. I got the image of the dart from a stock-image website. ELEWA
32
It’s hard to convince people to buy a 450-page book about math. It’s not going to sell as easily as a book that has, say, Abraham Lincoln on the cover. I liked that this got across the idea of uncertainty or imprecision. There’s this very perfect, Euclidean circle and then you have this random cloud of dart holes. A popular misconception about mathematics is that its discoveries are made in this methodical, step-by-step way, when, in reality, it involves a lot of best guesses and going back and trying again.
Stories of families whose children are deeply different from their parents AUTHOR Andrew Solomon DESIGNER Rex Bonomelli (BFA 1998 Graphic Design), freelance designer The cover was really Andrew’s idea. It’s a photograph of his son. This was a big book for Scribner, so I wanted to give it something special. My idea was to have the jacket printed on foil, to give the water a glimmery quality. But you have to be careful with foil—done the wrong way, it can make a cover look gaudy and overly commercial. When you’re designing for a big, serious nonfiction book, for the typeface you try to think about things its audience would read, like smart newspapers and smart magazines. The typography for those kinds of publications has a certain look, and I wanted this typeface to be in the same BONOMELLI
V I SUA L A R T S JOUR N A L