Na Kim on her process:
We have some form of manuscript pretty much every time. Sometimes it’ll just be a proposal, but usually there’s a first draft read I can read for reference. For fiction I pretty much read the manuscript from start to finish, but with non-fiction I find it easier to work when I have a general outline of what the book is trying to say. Obviously’s it’s harder to work on a book that you don’t like, because you lose interest in it. But it can be equally difficult when you’re really invested in a book personally, and get an idea of what it should look like in your head. If that sketch doesn’t get approved it can be really hard to let go of.
I usually take notes while I’m reading, and I don’t really approach it like a book I would read for fun. You’re looking for things that stand out visually, and can serve as metaphors for events or characters in the book. I try to sum up the book in three words and figure out descriptions that help me start seeing how I want to approach it.
There’s books where you immediately have an idea. You get this one concept, or vision, in your mind, and that can be pretty exciting. There’s a book that will be published in the fall of this year, and it’s a memoir by Tegan and Sara called High School – even just the title can evoke a lot of emotion and moods. That was a book where I had an idea instantly, and really pushed for it, and it happened to work out.
Kafka Covers:
I remember that my first reaction to seeing these covers was one of crushing disappointment. Disappointment caused by the realization that, as a book designer, I could never have arrived at such a brilliant and brave solution.
Launched in 2007, the covers – a collaboration between creative agency Mother, and Penguin Press Art Director Jim Stoddart – feature the work of Gary Card and Jacob Sutton. Crucially, the images were not originated for use on the covers but were created independently by (the now hugely successful) Card and Sutton shortly after graduating from Central Saint Martins. Interviewed recently in Varoom! magazine, Card recalls that the photographs were produced in Sutton’s bedroom and that, at the time they had ‘no idea what we were making’. He isn’t even sure how the images came to the attention of Mother/Stoddart, who repurposed them to such spectacular effect for the series. For Card, now a set designer, it was the first commercial use of his work.
The covers present us with scenarios so thrillingly bizarre, they resonate with even the most superficial awareness of Kafka’s writing – which in my view, is part of their success. As a set of images, they have an almost oppressively flat tone – I can’t help but imagine them to be the documentation of some dangerous form of nineteenth-century institutionalized therapy. There is a sense of deranged urgency about the way the props have been created and applied to the model. The honesty of the materials and the crudeness of the making seemed so progressive compared to the contrived book cover photo shoots I was used to being involved with.
This naïve quality is also reflected in the lettering, which dispenses with the author’s first name and instead presents four variations of hand-generated ‘Kafka’s together with accompanying titles. I’ve always loved that the lettering itself looks vulnerable – it seems to reinforce a sympathetic response to the subject of the images. For me they are a perfect package of playful exuberance, experimentation, creative serendipity and risk-taking, and in an age when we are so quick to tire of visual devices, they have lost none of their freshness.
Launched in 2007, the covers – a collaboration between creative agency Mother, and Penguin Press Art Director Jim Stoddart – feature the work of Gary Card and Jacob Sutton. Crucially, the images were not originated for use on the covers but were created independently by (the now hugely successful) Card and Sutton shortly after graduating from Central Saint Martins. Interviewed recently in Varoom! magazine, Card recalls that the photographs were produced in Sutton’s bedroom and that, at the time they had ‘no idea what we were making’. He isn’t even sure how the images came to the attention of Mother/Stoddart, who repurposed them to such spectacular effect for the series. For Card, now a set designer, it was the first commercial use of his work.
The covers present us with scenarios so thrillingly bizarre, they resonate with even the most superficial awareness of Kafka’s writing – which in my view, is part of their success. As a set of images, they have an almost oppressively flat tone – I can’t help but imagine them to be the documentation of some dangerous form of nineteenth-century institutionalized therapy. There is a sense of deranged urgency about the way the props have been created and applied to the model. The honesty of the materials and the crudeness of the making seemed so progressive compared to the contrived book cover photo shoots I was used to being involved with.
This naïve quality is also reflected in the lettering, which dispenses with the author’s first name and instead presents four variations of hand-generated ‘Kafka’s together with accompanying titles. I’ve always loved that the lettering itself looks vulnerable – it seems to reinforce a sympathetic response to the subject of the images. For me they are a perfect package of playful exuberance, experimentation, creative serendipity and risk-taking, and in an age when we are so quick to tire of visual devices, they have lost none of their freshness.
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