‘Yes, but what’s the point of a cover?’ That’s a question that came up a lot as Eddie, Kathy and I tried to decide how ldp’s books would look on the outside. Obvious answers like ‘to hold the whole thing together and keep the dirt out’ didn’t do the job. What we wondered was what does a cover mean to an e-publisher whose physical books would be supplied ‘print on demand’. Obviously we would really like to support bookshops and have bookshop sales, but ‘shelf-appeal’ wasn’t going to be an important marketing tool.
At the start the idea was to take Eddie’s excellent design for the company’s favicon and use it large on the covers with colour variations for each title. This approach of course has very distinguished exemplars – Penguin in its pioneering days and Faber and Faber to name but two. However, when we enlarged the favicon we all agreed that the black lines were a bit overweight. (Eddie, whose lines they were, said brutal; Kathy and I said strong). We decided that the favicon was best at logo size. If it was used larger it would need to be adapted and I set out to see what we could do. At this stage all the covers were still to be basically the same.
We were thinking about Xenia’s book on Graphicacy and wondering exactly what ground it should cover. I was keen to include popular and street art. They seem to have been amongst the most vibrant visual languages of the past hundred years. I spotted a website which I shared with Eddie. Here came the creative leap ! Eddie immediately said, we need something like this on our covers – an ‘intervention’. That was the breakthrough. Seeing if we all thought it would work took a little longer. I tried to envisage what interventions might look like and did some sample covers – collage, cut-up, scribble, graffiti – and satisfied myself that provided the favicon appeared almost anything could be done – even distorting and playing with the favicon itself.
At that point, without really having planned it, we found we had done something a little unusual and re-defined the idea of a ‘cover’ for the digital world. Cover used to be a sales tool. Often it was very well designed – for example Romek Marber’s series of crime covers for Penguin. Very seldom did it involve the author. However, for our ‘covers’ the idea was to go back to the author and ask for an intervention that would symbolize or represent the book. All the author had to do was to include the favicon somewhere. We would provide technical help if required. The cover became redundant as a sales tool and instead became another way for the authors to make their point.
We hope these covers may become classics in their own right. My only worry is that the first to appear will be mine for Models of Change. About the worst thing is to be told ‘you can do what you like’
The result is that at this moment I have absolutely no idea what I am going to do. Probably Prue, Niall and Xenia feel the same! We will all be interested to hear what you make of our efforts.
We’d particularly like to thank Pete Simcoe of Simcoemedia for all his support in getting LDP underway and being flexible enough to be able to accommodate our approach.