(From Lit Hub. Link to the complete post given below)
As an art director for the Simon & Schuster imprint, I’m fortunate to be able to work on some of the best books being published today and with some of the best editors in the industry. I often have more than enough on my plate designing and art directing our numerous titles, but because I truly love what I do, and I’m a bit of a workaholic, I also have an active freelance career in addition to my full-time job. In my free time, I design a wide range of fiction and non-fiction covers for publishing houses across the US and internationally.
When I was contacted by Grove Atlantic last year to design a memoir, I was thrilled—I had never worked with them before and I’ve always admired the books they publish. When a follow-up email mentioned that the author, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, had specifically asked for me—she found me through a Google search and said she loved the way I integrated illustrations and fonts—I was shocked and incredibly flattered . . . which quickly led to an overwhelming sense of dread that I would never be able to pull this off, and that all of my previous design work had been the result of divine intervention. Such is the roller coaster of creative work.
I soon got over myself and started working. I was immediately drawn in to Lisa’s beautiful manuscript, but it proved particularly difficult for me—I, too, had a messy, complicated, on-and-off relationship with my father for many years after my parents’ divorce. I’d never read anything else that captured the perspective of a young child dealing with a mercurial, often volatile, parent in quite the same way this book does. While it’s rare and wonderful to connect with a manuscript in this way, too much emotional investment can be detrimental to the design process. Often, if I truly love a book or connect with it on a personal level, there’s an added pressure to get it right—to do it justice.
Read more at the Lit Hub link here
