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Design Category
Book design, 1996
Design firm
The MIT Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
Collection
(1997) 50 Books/50 Covers of 1996
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The authors of this book suggested using the image of a spike trail for the jacket. They didn’t, however, mention a typographic treatment of the book title. After pushing the title and subtitle around for a few minutes, I recognized that the letter “I,” if set in the proper typeface, could be a spike. Rotating the authors’ names to read vertically seemed an obvious choice, especially given Rob’s extremely long last name.
If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might not have recognized the possibility for creating these visual rhymes. Surely some else would have, after the fact, and I would have kicked myself for missing the opportunity. The jacket designed itself, really, and only took me about twenty minutes.