Wit and Cleverness
Peter Mendelsund of Jacket Mechanical on the state of book jacket design:
Book jackets these days, for reasons I won’t unpack, seem to revel, overtly, in wit, conceptual deviousness, unusual clever or droll juxtapositions- we, as a professional community, seem to have elevated the visual bon mot above all other virtues. Again, I won’t delve into the “why” of the matter here for want of space, but suffice it to say that clever work is the work that is celebrated in our community. Not that wit in itself isn’t valuable, and doesn’t have an appropriate place in design- but wit is not the same thing as insightfulness, and often insightfulness is what is called for in a book jacket. Our fetishizing of cleverness has taken a toll I believe, in that (quite often) these clever solutions work at cross-purposes to the (more often than not sincere) narratives they represent. A book in which an author has gone out on a considerable limb in order to write in a genuine and unaffected fashion does not want a cover that winks at the reader. Wit, when it becomes compulsive (as anyone knows who has a friend who puns too often) quickly becomes its opposite- dullness or predictability. Are we, as a professional community, that punning guy? I hope not.
Simply, cleverness and intelligence are not the same thing. Graphic design can very easily stay in the witty and clever, but without any substance—just empty jokes. Cleverness is short-lived and does not age well. Be sure to look at Peter’s most recent work—they feel incredibly timeless and classic.
Maria Bustillos also tackles the idea of cleverness in her piece on movie tagline copywriters Poster Boys from The New York Times:
Richard’s [Goldman] favorite was one he worked on with David [Saltzman] for an ESPN documentary called “The Streak.” It was about a wrestling team that had never lost a match; it had “the longest running winning streak in the history of high school sports.” But “the tension was so unbelievable. If they lost they would be disgracing their grandparents. So my line was, ‘The more you win the more you have to lose.’”
I asked why that was his favorite.
“Because it’s NOT clever.”
David and I both tell him well, yes, it is clever.
“No, it’s truth! It’s true.”
“So truth trumps cleverness?”
“Absolutely.”
The apparent shallowness and glitz of Hollywood are often mocked, but it has always seemed to me that there is a ton of intelligence and passion that goes into making every bit of a Hollywood movie or TV show. Not just careerist passion but true, artistic passion. “Sometimes you feel you are writing an aphorism. Something that will last forever,” Richard told me.
“A book is a flexible mirror of the mind and the body. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.”
I’ve never not been totally stopped in my tracks when this cover pops up in various collections of Penguin/Pelican covers. Just perfect. I think it’s about time I found a physical copy.
Holy sweet Moses, this is brilliant!
Have you seen Things Magazine’s collection of book covers from Pelican, called The Pelican Project?
You haven’t? Oh, well you should probably go sneak a peek. It’s a bottomless well of design inspiration, fine tuning your spidey-senses of clarity, concept, and conciseness. And, if you have visited, I’d go take a look again, even just to witness that beautiful, dusty, distressed blue.
Welp. There goes my afternoon. Seriously. This is a goldmine.
It’s hard to believe that this school year has come to a close. I seriously have no idea where it went as it often feels like I just started at Kutztown yesterday. Tomorrow, I’m turning in my final project for the semester, that I have photographed in it’s entirety above. The project is a full hardcover book based off a Grimms Fairytale. I’m really happy with the end result and while I’m not sure it’s my favorite project I’ve ever done, I think it’s a nice representation of a style I’ve found myself growing into as of late and culmination of the various design experiments I’ve done this past year.
The book evolved slightly from my original plan, mostly in an attempt to simplify and only show what is necessary. All the watercolor and pen and ink illustrations were done by hand (something I’ve never done in a finished project before) and I’m quite proud of how they turned out. The finished book is printed on lightweight watercolor paper and bound in a hard cover. The final presentation looks really nice, if I do say so myself, and think this is a good project to finish up on.
There are some exciting things in the works for this summer and then I’ll be back at Kutztown for one more year in the Fall before I’m let loose in the design world. It’s going to be a good year.
