New Bones was a poetry zine made in an edition of 100,
distributed for free by being left in library books during April 2012. The curator of the project contacted me to design the cover. I love working on projects with a raw nature; real and lo fi design work is enjoyable and rewarding. On this project I thought I knew pretty much what the cover was going to look like. I was asked to do something illustrative and I knew it wasn’t going to be taxing. However when I sat down to do the work I read through some of the content in order to get a feel for what it was I was designing.
A particular poem totally engaged me in a way I am not always affected by amateur poetry. I instantly felt that the cover I had planned to do would undermine the work and felt extreme pressure now to achieve a visual image for something which had so impressed me.
How do you go about giving visual identity to good writing?
Anything too literal and it is almost a mockery of the content.
I decided that what it most needed to be was intriguing. Hint at something but give nothing away. Other points I decided it needed to have were: being striking, edgy, crudely produced and not detract from the content. I started by drawing a silhouette of a bone. This was then blown up and right down several times on a photocopier to degrade and roughen the edges. Typography was arranged by hand on the copy bed to find an engaging composition. I wanted to split the cover two-tone to give it a dynamic abstract quality.
Parts of the design were cut off and re- arranged to fragment the cover and the whole thing was then copied over and over until it had the right look. I wanted to avoid it looking obvious or safe but something that looked under-designed and effortless. I think the whole thing looks very authentic to the zine aesthetic, and suits the content by being mature yet rebellious as student writers usually are. It doesn't look intellectual but just the right amount of serious.
