Book design is a slow process. Last summer I designed a book for Thames & Hudson, A Year in the Life of Facehunter that is just now being published. The Facehunter is photographer Yvan Rodic, who travels the world in search of culture, style and beauty and posts the images to his two online blogs, Facehunter, which is more street-fashion, and YvanRodic.com, which is themed around his travels. I'm really proud of this book, and learned a lot doing it, so I thought I'd post a little bit more about the design.
Finding the right cover is the hardest thing in the world, especially when you have thousands and thousands of great images to choose from and many people in different departments at the publishers have to be convinced. What I liked about this is that you can't actually see the girl's face, so there's something quite intriguing about it. And the heart is a nice nod towards Yvan's passion for doing what he does. (It's interesting to compare ours with editions published in other countries.)
We thought it would be nice, though, to do something a bit special with this book, and so it actually has a french-fold paper cover. The brilliant thing about a french-fold, I discovered (never actually having designed one before) is all the extra surfaces you get to play around with as it unfolds. There's also space for images on the printed cover of the book itself, so we have a different cover underneath. It was nice to have a fun, more personal shot here.
and the back – I like the way this image captures a split-second moment in time.
The whole jacket unfolds: on the back, if you like, you get a poster for your wall.
It was quite complicated to design, though. Here it is unfolded. It took me ages to work out which bits went which way up (so it would work when folded), and all the things like overlaps for where it folds around the book. The pink neon was the T&H design director Hanna's idea. It's a colour we both love, and there needed to be something bright and zingy as the main cover image is quite dark. I love how it turned out.
We also used it to do the passport stamps on the endpapers. These are real stamps from Yvan's passport, I just doctored it a bit to take off any sensitive information. He's just had to give that passport up, he told me, and has a new blank one now. But given how much he gets around it won't be long before it's just as full of stamps.
Here are some of my favourite spreads from inside the book. I love the yellow, here. I picked it up from the NY taxi on the picture bottom right.
Section openers are always a double-page spread, and give a really nice chance to showcase some of his best pictures. I love the way the light catches the girl's hair, here, and that jacket she's wearing. It's a great pic.
And this, a spontaneous moment on the street in Cape Town, is one of my very favourites from the whole book.
Hopefully it's not too obvious and the reader just has a sense that the pictures hold together nicely and enjoys looking at them more closely, but to get that to work there's usually something, a theme, that ties each spread together. Here it's the curved shapes of the Brazilian architecture, and the colour:
Whereas here there's something more geometric and angular going on:
Here in this spread from Berlin there's a night-time party vibe:
Whereas here it's daytime in bright and breezy Sydney:
Sometimes it's a mood. I always thought of this as the 'happy' spread:
Whereas here, well this one is a bit obvious, but I just loved those fluffy white dogs and the snow.
Double-page spread images give a bit of breathing space, and help with the feeling of variety:
While sometimes there are simple pairs of images that are a nod back to the original Facehunter book design.
Every so often I liked to have a shot of Yvan in there, but I like that they're not always obvious. Here he is in a photo-booth strip
Or sometimes he's hiding:
This one is obvious, but I do love the way his hair echoes that mountain in the background. It always makes me smile.
I was thinking of suggesting to T&H they do a competition, like Where's Wally, for how many times Yvan appears in the book. I'd have to go through quite carefully myself to find them. There's definitely a couple where he just appears in a reflection, you have to look really carefully. But he's there.
And finally, given how much he travels I thought it would be interesting to represent this through some data. Yvan uses a site called 'flightdiary' to track his travels and I played around with ways of representing this information graphically. Any airline geeks out there (like the one I live with) might have noticed that each plane below is a correct silhouette for that aircraft type…
Well, not much else to say except it's available to buy now and will take you on a stylish trip around the world in an afternoon, is full of inspiring images from places to fashion and interiors, and then will look cool on your shelf afterwards. One of the other fun things I got to do was go to Paris to make this little film about it: have a look.