By Joanne Bolton of Bolton Associates, fine printing services
I was designing a book at the time I got an email with this cover attached. I took a quick look. OMG. Nothing was right. A hideous purple font, the most wretched kind, uneven with the subtitle squashed underneath. A fuzzy nasty monkey, unfocused and blown out, with the other subtitles at the bottom on skewed lines. What a mess. Even the monkey wasn’t centered.
TITLE: HARD BITE AND OTHER SHORT STORIES by Anonymous-9 ARTIST: REBECCA FORSTER
But because of all the wrong reasons, I simply couldn’t take my eyes off of it! Hideous, I thought. That nasty ape is all soft and fuzzy against the hard type. His nose is ugly. He looks like a person, or something subconscious, my worst nightmare. Why am I still looking at him? And so it went.
When Anonymous-9 called and asked me what I thought, I said, “It’s horrible and genius,” and was astonished to hear myself say it. But I had to say it, because I couldn’t stop looking at it—like a living, smoking, twisted train wreck.
Our eyes are very conservative and also very predictable. Many studies have been done to figure out what the eye wants to see, and then the results are used to get people to read magazine ads or book titles. My eyes tell me what they see first, what they reject, what excites them, what bores them and I just observe my own eyes at work. I am still looking at that wretched cover. The artist who made this cover, Rebecca Forster, is holding my eyes even longer than I want. How can this be?
The first thing I see is the frightening mouth. I quickly attempt to make the intellectual jump from mouth to title. To get there, however, I have to look the monkey in the eye. So I look him in the eye and suddenly I am back at his teeth. That is because his eyes are the darkest thing on the page, and his teeth are the brightest. Our eyes like contrast. So here I am looking the monkey in the eyeball and then back to the teeth. This goes on for a bit like that maddening ball attached to a paddle with a bit of elastic, bong, bong, bong… back and forth until I force myself to see what the ugly title says. By this time it’s almost a joke, I mean, the joke is on me, as I have been bitten hard already by the monkey. Chomped up. Humiliated, it’s time to look away, but there are so many things my eyes still want to digest and grouch about—that squashed subtitle, for example. But wait, don’t get too close, or it’s back to the paddleball—chomp, chomp, chomp.
So now I have definitely spent far too long on this cover. Still, before turning away I notice the large white words at the bottom flirting with my attention—”Anonymous-9.” What on earth is the line of type below doing, all fuzzy and set unevenly on a wide black, wavy line, thrown together to nag at my conservative eyes? (This is the propensity to grouch when standards of uniformity are broken.) The cover is not finished with me yet; my eyes still won’t let go.
Of course, by now the monkey owns me. Rebecca Forster has designed a book cover that satirizes its own contents as well as my participation in reading it. Her monkey isn’t horrible and threatening, he’s laughing his nasty head off.
Reader beware, this book cover bites hard! There is every possibility that the stories behind the cover will do the same.
Joanne Bolton is a book production expert. She has participated in the cover design and printing of hundreds of titles, many of them fine art books. Arguably her most famous client is actor Jeff Bridges, who works closely with Joanne on art-photography books that he custom-crafts after finishing his films.
To find out more about Joanne Bolton, Rebecca Forster, or Anonymous-9 follow their links.
It’s an amazing cover all right. Catches my eye and draws me right in, like looking at a car crash or something.
Here at the Miffledrip Academy of Artistic Appreciation we are shocked, SHOCKED I say, that such outrageous imagery should pass on the cover of a “book,” AND I USE THE WORD CAREFULLY. I move immediately to have this offence removed from the interweb, lest others see it and have their eyes damaged. Who joins me, I say?!
Signed seething,
Edwina Miffledrip
Head Artiste
The Miffledrip Academy
hahaha
Damn fine cover. But because it’s so right, not because it’s wrong.
Off-center monkeys rock.
From Rebecca Forster (our spam folder has a mind of its own):
Edwina,
Genius is often misunderstood. Thank goodness Joanne has the appropriate artistic soul. I, for one, am having this cover blown up, framed and put in my dining room as a shining example of how my mind works. Perhaps it will help to know that, on mother’s day, my sons celebrate by taking me to horror movies of the most base sort. Grind House comes to mind.
I know there will be many readers who appreciate the incredible collaborative effort behind designer and author! Have a cocktail, Edwina, and take another look!
Just a couple of facts on Rebecca Forster: she is a bestselling author of legal thrillers and a few days ago her e-book HOSTILE WITNESS was #1 in legal thrillers on Amazon in the free category. Over 9,000 people downloaded her book and crashed her website in the bargain. Check out HOSTILE WITNESS, as well as rebeccaforster.com
What a wildly cool cover! Gets you by the throat, no? Really dig it, and the stories, they speak for themselves.