Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Book Cover: Mapping the Beast (2007)

I just finished working on a rough version of the new Jeff VanderMeer-edited anthology Mapping the Beast: The Best of Leviathan and Album Zutique, which will be published by Prime Books sometime in 2007. So far, the cover has gotten initial approval from Jeff and Prime, so that's exciting. I'll add more as it comes to pass.

On to the design itself. Jeff had suggested using the Leviathan and ship image by Liza Phoenix, which is a great painting that really fits the theme. Once Jeff came up with the title Mapping the Beast, I was pretty excited because I had recently bought this huge Taschen-published tome called Atlas Maior, which was initially published in 1665. In any case, it has amazing cartographic imagery, which I used extensively in the design. The difficult part was that the book itself is about 20" tall and weighs probably 30lbs, so it was kind of a nightmare to get specific pages onto my scanner to scan.

The title type is set in Poetica, which is a face designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe in 1992. Poetica is reminiscent of early Renaissance typography and the cool part of the typeface is that it has a zillion different sets of ligatures, alternate characters, swashes, ornaments, etc., which I used a bit on the cover.