Book Tour Things (Guest Blogger: Stefan Sagmeister)

I just completed my only two Canadian dates on the book tour and am heading home towards New York City, with a short stop and talk in Chicago. There are already 20 American dates behind me all along the West coast, the Midwest, the South and the East coast. Having previously talked to a couple of authors that traveled from afar only to wind up stuck in a Borders with 8 people attending and 4 more browsing nearby--unsure if they actually should sit down--I paired our publisher with the American Institute for Graphic Arts, whose local chapters organized the events. Thus we wound up with mostly sold-out auditoriums, holding between 200 and 1,000 people, which made the entire endeavor infinitely more pleasurable.

My book Things I have learned in my life so far has been out for about two months. During that time, it has been the bestselling art and design book on the Amazons of the world (.com, .de, .co.uk), and I am still not very happy.

This unhappiness stems in large part from the feature Customers who bought this item also bought, which in my case shows that they all bought other design books, hence all my buyers are other designers.

As a designer, I spend a lot of time around other designers, and I get rather self-conscious about becoming somebody who designs for his peers. I have always felt that art for other artists and music for other musicians can become quite self-referential and incestuous. While some of it is necessary to bring the profession forward, the larger part often presents a rather narrow, insular worldview, and the results are often boring.

So if you yourself are NOT a designer, please do look at my book's Amazon page (and right afterwards, check out The Complete Guide to Home Plumbing). It would make me feel so good.

I run a design studio in New York, and among many other things (we used to concentrate on the design of album covers for bands like the Talking Heads and the Stones), we design books.

This turns out to be mostly picture books, mostly because we get to design the entire thing--the cover, the spine, all the pages inside, the flaps.

Fiction and nonfiction books are often designed by different designers: one does the cover, and other the interior pages.

Within the world of graphic design, these tend to be satisfying jobs because we deal with engaging content, get to meet interesting people, design something that is not immediately thrown away, and after a lot of hard work wind up with a neat, compact object that remains as an artifact of that process.

Here is an example:

We were asked to design Worldchanging, which reports about new, positive developments in science, engineering, architecture, business and politics affecting and changing this world. Through the die-cut holes of the slipcase, the (recycled, of course) paper on the cover yellows significantly over time, allowing the sun to imprint (and change) the book cover itself.

We designed this book to appeal not just to a core, green audience, but to a wide spectrum of the general public. It went well.

The following criteria were important to us during the design process:

We wanted this to be positive. We also wanted something innovative, that does not just talk about change but proofs it in the concept (the book cover changes with the power of the sun, the sun designs our cover). We wanted something that allows the reader to browse intuitively, quickly finding the subject he/she is looking for, without having to learn a new finding system. We wanted something that looks and feels authoritative, yet is pretty enough to be left out on a coffee table, without winding up with a coffee table book. The usability needed to be versatile, so that it can be browsed on a desk, leafed through in bed, or checked out on an airplane.

And I admit that I came up with some of these criteria after we designed it all.