There was something rebellious about the idea of a weapon fashioned from office supplies - like staging a miniature coup. I liked the imagery of some poor wage slave slinging handmade arrows into a cork-board in a desperate, maybe sophomoric attempt at entertainment. It was important that it only be made using items that are on hand in every office. The crossbow was assembled using various objects from our office supply shelf. One criticism was that it was hard to tell what the pushpins were: ‘are they candy?’ Ultimately it was decided to go in another direction. As is sometimes the case, legibility was a concern. The end result turned the commonplace office objects into something quite pretty but also begged the question of how many hours (many) and how much monotony (a lot) went in to assembling such a thing. I liked the idea of the typography being made up of pushpins. Having some experience with this, the design solutions were intuitive.
Better yet, how might a creative person fill the day at a job that doesn’t allow self-expression. I wanted the cover to show how someone might occupy themselves at a bullshit job. “ a great title and a simple but fascinating premise: the rise of useless, meaningless jobs and an argument against them. The rejected covers start on the left and the final versions are on the right.Ĭover Design by David Litman for Simon & Schuster Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber These designers shared their rejected work with Electric Literature and elucidated on how the final cover best encapsulated the essence of the book. I asked ten book cover designers about the evolution of their design process.
Using color, typography, and artwork, a cover has to be bold enough to attract attention and evoke the message and tone of the book at the same time. A proposed cover can be killed for a myriad of reasons: too gendered, too messy, too simple, too cliched and the list goes on. The book cover is the first thing a prospective buyer sees and a cover can go through multiple iterations before reaching the shelves of your local Barnes & Nobles. I remember walking into the Strand bookstore and immediately gravitating towards Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter because the (now iconic) millennial pink cover stood out in a sea of paperbacks. Have you ever bought a book just because the cover caught your eye? I have. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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