Jonathan Gray is Covering Your Favorite Books & Sharing his Process

While reading a feature on designer, Jonathan Gray from It's Nice That another life I would have been a designer of books. While pursuing my undergraduate degree in graphic design from San Francisco State University in the mid-2000s I was tasked with designing alternate covers for three popular books from 2006. This assignment was one of my favorites an served as an introduction to designers making careers working within this medium, namely Chip Kidd and the host of designers from McSweeney's.

Concept + Access // Identity + Interpretation

“I struggle designing without knowing the mood of the book, it’s character,” he says. “I’m not good at fishing in the dark for concepts and I think my best work comes about when it’s rooted in the text.” ~ Jonathan Gray

The appeal of working in this medium, for me, was tethered to my professional history of working in libraries. The obvious connection, "I like books!" is undeniable but I also recognized the parallels to creating access points to materials through subject headings. When catalogers or indexers receive materials how do they choose a subject heading that will accurately capture the "about-ness" of the material and communicate this to those who might consume it? Solving this problem, visually, was a very appealing conundrum.

Visual Currency

During instructional sessions for students in the arts programs I regularly mention that the baseline for recognizing good design has increased dramatically over the past decade and a half. Intuitively, people understand what is graphically appealing without actually knowing why because businesses of all types and sizes understand that it's vital in today's landscape. Users expectations for design have grown in lockstep with technology. From templates in MS Office to built in tools within CMS platforms like this one, graphically sophisticated palettes are readily accessible to any novice. If you aren't paying attention to these tools and utilizing them to their fullest, users notice. And judge. And decide. As Marlo Stansfield from HBOs The Wire explains, "My name is my name." Smart design can often be the difference between someone engaging with content or moving on.

Accurately communicating 100-400 pages worth of story through graphic imagery is just as hard as it sounds and doing it creatively (and repeatedly) is an even greater feat. I really appreciated the honesty in his approach:

1. Hooray new job!

2. Read it and take notes.

3. Look at notes and recognize sinking feeling in stomach.

4. Bang head against wall as deadline looms, repeating mantra: ‘you’re shit, you’re shit…’

5. Look on as deadline passes and angry emails appear in inbox.

6. Go back to notes and realize that actually, if I take a breath and calmly assess what’s in front of me, then give myself a bit of room to play around, there is usually the makings of an idea in there somewhere.

Number six is one that we can all learn from and if you want a bit more inspiration from Mr. Gray you can read the full article below.