Alphabet Roadtrip

Lettering Design for Book Covers: Contemporary Fiction

Here are samples of different ways contemporary script calligraphy can be integrated into book cover design. Most of these books are ongoing series, in which the hand lettered book title becomes part of the brand.

                                 

Casual, fun brush lettering integrated into the illustration

Monoline pen handwriting for Sophie Kinsella's "Shopaholic" series

 

Brush calligraphy that flows with the curves of the illustration          

                                    

Script as illustration, a visual pun

 

Contemporary brush script designed to play off of a font

                       

A long title treated as a text shape for Laurel House

Elegant contemporary pen calligraphy in two different styles

 

 

Lettering Design For Book Covers: Fantasy Genre

 

Title design by Iskra, a mix of Gothic and Uncial pen calligraphy

                    

Drawn typographic lettering design by Iskra

Title and Author lettering design by Iskra

The Imajica letterforms were designed by me as a proprietary style to be used in Clive Barker's books over a period of time. They were then lifted and turned into a font for general use by another designer without my knowledge or permission, a perplexing and less than gallant appropriation of one artist's works by another.

See more book cover title lettering at Iskra Design.

Classic Calligraphic Lettering Styes for Romance Book Jackets

I do title and author design for many books by romance authors. These recent covers for Karen Robards and Danielle Steele are a good match of lettering style with other visual elements.

Title and author calligraphy by Iskra, Art Director Lisa Litwack

Title calligraphy and lettering design by Iskra, Art Director Lynn Andreozzi

Lettering Design for Book Covers: Samples of Historically-based Calligraphy and Hand Lettering for Titles

What I like about book title design is the variety of skills I get to use. It's not just about pens and brushes and lettering techniques.  Each genre of book requires a different expression of historical era and a feel for the part of popular (or elite) culture the book lives in. These examples of book title and author typography are all based on traditional historical letterforms.

"Juliet" is Humanist, with a flourish. Alexandra Ripley's "Love Divine" is a very condensed and stylized version of Uncial. "The Lost Recipe for Happiness" is a nostalgic mix of small caps with ornamental italic accents. "Nelson's Trafalgar" incorporates a hand-drawn cartouche with a script that is more font than calligraphy, although it is completely hand-lettered.

 

The childrens' and fantasy genre books below draw from historical sources also, but with subtle differences. Each cover treatment should look unique to the author, and the typography and hand-lettering become important parts of the author and series brand. "Babe" is done with a calligraphy pen on rough paper, which gives it a soft look that goes with the sweetness of the cover colors and the rounded animal shapes. "The Knight" started as calligraphic Roman Caps but was then inked and given a more retro-typographic feeling, enhanced by the outline. The bolder serifs give it a masculine and heroic feeling echoed in the illustration.

 

 

Additional samples of the Uncial style showing how differently it can be expressed. For Brian Jaques (yes, you can fall in love with a mouse!) the ornamental serifs and quirky curves go with Martin the Warrior's character and mimic the ornamental border. "Son of the Sword" is closest to a purely historical Uncial of any of these titles, done with an edged pen on rough paper. The Uncial d is one of my favorite letters of all time.

 

Hand lettering and hand lettered typography © Iskra Johnson

See my book jacket portfolio at www.iskradesign.com

Zen Brushwork in Lettering Design: Tools of the Trade

When the art director at Penguin USA called to ask me to write the word "Zen" for a book called Zen and the Art of Making a Living it couldn't have come at a better time. I was at that very moment sitting on my meditation cushion in a corner of my office contemplating The Emptiness after finishing several advertising campaigns, and I had nothing on my calendar. Although I felt cold terror at the prospect of this little three letter word, a word that conjured centuries of calligraphy masters in their robes and sandals not to mention the three sensei I had studied with, I said "Sure." And then I said to myself, as I gathered up a dozen brushes and pens and stacks of paper, "It can't be any harder than that other three-letter word, "new."

Stones and metal weight used to keep fragile rice paper from lifting

At that time I was still grinding my own ink, using a traditional inkstone. Now for most brushwork I use Moon Palace Ink which I get from John Neal Books, although I sometimes grind ink from a stick and mix it with liquid ink for certain very absorbent papers.

  

Inkstone and traditional sumi ink.

The ink must be tested out many times to see how black it is, blotted and tried on different papers, with different brushes, as each one gives a different effect. I also use pens, which give a different character entirely.

Automatic pen, oldstyle ruling pen, edged pen, new ruling pen, steel brush

As I work I am designing in the moment with the gesture of the brush. I try to remain intuitive and kinesthetic, feeling the drag of the ink and the paper and experimenting with the invisible element of calligraphy: time. How fast or slow you move the brush completely transforms the stroke. Design, however, includes inconvenient facts like the resemblance of a "Z" to a "2" and psychological factors: should the word feel elegant and disciplined? artful? playful? ordinary? I keep all this into account as well as the history of western calligraphic forms and the basic styles of shodo. The final style that was chosen for the title is based on a hybrid of "bone" and "clerical" styles of Chinese calligraphy. The book is now in its fifth printing, but has kept the same title throughout.

                             
Photographs and calligraphy © 2011 Iskra Johnson

Part Two: Zen Brushwork in Brand Design and Advertising

  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.

Elizabeth Taylor Book Cover: Calligraphy in Book Cover Design

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.

Title Design for Ashley Judd: All That is Bitter & Sweet

    
 

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.

The Social Animal: Proposed Cover Designs for David Brooks' New Book

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

Script Lettering for Romance Book Jackets

 
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.