An Innerview: Rebecca Burgess asks Holly Ollivander wazzup ... page 2

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Rebecca: When it comes to books, what do you feel are key elements that contribute to a good design?

Holly: I'll have to go back to the eighties for this.

I was walking through Bookstop - remember that store? Alas, no more. They had a fabulous location in Houston, in an old converted cinema - anyway, I was walking through Bookstop in my usual daydream-y stupor when I was stopped in my tracks by this cover for Still Life With Woodpecker. I was gobsmacked - I was astonished - at the double, triple, quradruple meanings of what I was seeing; the symbolism kept unfolding like origami. My thoughts ran something like this:

"A Camel cigarettes packet! No it's not...wait, maybe it is...no it's not, it's been turned inside out with a red-headed woodpecker carrying a stick of dynamite... a match in its beak - instead of a camel ... Look at the pyramids! Are there pyramids on a Camel cigarettes packet? I seem to remember some...or maybe not..." I tell you, my brain was doing cartwheels.

Without realising it consciously, I had been jolted out of my directionless drift around the store - I was riveted. To take a brand so accepted that no one really looks at it anymore and use it as the launch pad for a wickedly subversive reinterpretation was beyond brilliance, it approached alchemy. It did the job. It made me look and - more to the point - made me imagine something wonderful was inside the cover.

This is the highest purpose that any design can ever hope to accomplish. A good bookcover design excites the same anticipation as discovering a treasure chest... the beholder desires first to possess it and then to discover the wonders that surely lie within.

Key: Open your eyes. Look around you. Learn to re-see what you have possibly been missing through over-familiarity. Train yourself to see it in a new way. There is a razor-sharp line between reinterpretation and rip-off, subtle reference and satire. The power of the artist lies in showing the viewer a new way of seeing what they may have stopped noticing on a conscious level.

Bookstop again. Late eighties, early nineties, sometime in the lull after big shoulderpads and before Friends. Walking around thinking ten thousand other thoughts when I was brought up short by this, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

I had never seen anything like it before.

Not only was the photograph simply splendid, the subject iconically compelling and reminiscent of the scales of justice, it was taken at that magical ten minutes that happens twice a day, when the sun comes up and when it goes down and the shadows are long and things look lit from within. What raises the bar is that it was not treated in sepia but in murky, swampy grey-green...evocative of place, timeless in approach.

The letters were well-spaced. This was very new and very old at the same time. Shortly after the printing press was invented, typesetters habitually used different text spacings as a way to get and keep the viewers interest and to keep everything nice and neat and blocklike. Example:

Key: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." - Ecclesiastes. Be an archeologist. Look again and again at the past. Learn like the shaman to evoke a feeling everyone can share at a genetic level by tapping into the ancient, arcane knowledge we all carry inside. Become a connoisseur of our human creative past. Meditate on cuneiform; study mayan carvings; look for repeating patterns in Aboriginal dreamtime paintings, tap in - you will find it inside - then bring it forth, express it in your work and it will have your own unique stamp on it.

If there truly is nothing new under the sun then that really takes the pressure off - you now have permission to relax and enjoy what you are doing. You can be a re-creator. What will be unique about what comes forth is that it was re-created by you.

For Miss Alice Merriwether's Long Lost Cakes & Further Arcane Inducements to Wonder I chose one of the simplest and most riveting images people are ever likely to encounter, the human eye. It confronts the viewer whilst simultaneously reassuring with its familiarity. It intrigues at the same time it disturbs. I could imagine someone reading this book on the train while the person in the facing seat would not be able to look away as long as that strangely relentless, unblinking eye was staring at them.

In POD media we are presently limited to gloss cover stock - no non-glare, satiny covers, no embossing, no metallic ink for us, no jacquard effect, just cold, glare-y gloss. To compensate, it is important to give the impression of warmth and texture and depth. I have attempted to accomplish this by using an image of old paper.

I have also been conducting a prolonged love affaire with Thomas Paine and similar antique fonts. I love their precise roughness and historical resonance.

Not long after I did the Miss Alice cover, I was once again drifting through a bookstore checkin' out the competiton and I came upon this...hey, they grabbed my curly ampersand!!! Bastards!

Good thing, really, at least I knew I was riding the same zeitgeist curve as the big boys. Or maybe they were riding mine... I like that thought. I'll work with that.

Since then I have noticed an explosion of antique woodcut-style fonts in use. I'm not ready to hop off that train yet, though. I'll keep using them for the time being. They speak to my soul.

Those clever so-and-so's also released this cover in two additional colours. This is evil brilliance in marketing terms, allowing the buyer to skip right over the question of, "Should I buy this book?" to the precise place where you - the seller - want them to be: "Now which cover of this book do I like best and would like to possess right now?"

The illusion of choice is a wonderful thing when you try to get people to jump through the hoop you are holding.

Offer them several colours of hoops and they'll cease to question whether they should leap or not. Give the buyer a sense of control and they will think they are making their own choice and not following what you wanted them to do all along.

Speaking of texture, this is a superb take on the joys of two-colour printing on speckled stock. It makes you want to pick it up and see how it feels. This is a good thing. Once it's actually in the buyer's hand, 9/10ths of the battle has been won.

Traditionally, two-colour screams, "Low budget business card! Run for your lives!" In this case it is clever and naive and subversively comforting. What does this teach us? That blue eyeshadow will always come back into style if it stays away for enough decades. It tells us that it's good to revisit what was once scorned for the simple fact that no one ever expects it to reappear. Until it does.

This can make a design look brand new whilst feeling somehow familiar. It is the design equivalent of deja vu. And that is powerful.

I grew this pepper. It's called a peter pepper and they all look this way. Most people think it's photoshopped. Everyone thinks it's rude. It's strong enough to stand alone on a gloss white background and silly enough to support the goofy font on the title.

Harking back to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, I spaced the letters wide on the author name. The cold mimimalism of the layout and gloss POD stock is warmed by the deep red and compelling shape of the pepper.

I hope.

Bill asked me, "Why did you put a large dead bug on the cover of my book?"

It was a valid question but it still makes me laugh to remember it. I explained that if Ransom had a totem animal it could easily be a dragonfly. Dragonflies are alluring and mystical symbols of summer as well as being ruthless predators so they are not always what they appear to be at first glance. Since the book Ransom Seaborn is Finbar's memory of events, long years after they occurred and told to the reader from his POV - the fact that the dragonfly is dead indicates that it belongs to the summertime of Fin's life, pressed into his personal book of memories.

Bill said I rocked.

That made me feel good.

Erring on the side of the Pre-Raphaelites, this is the Anti-Rand cover. Don't care. For this book it was precisely the right choice. It is a bawdy, lusty, lovely celebration of one woman's sexual liberation. No hunky Fabio types necessary. But still, all the cliches are met - and hopefully transcended - here.

I have a primer on primal shapes that I made for Rebecca Here if you care to look.

For A Better Life, the primary shape of text and figures is an hourglass (two triangles point-to-point) though I knocked the two children a bit towards the centre because strict symmetry on a photo-realistic cover always makes me a little nervous unless it's one shape at a time being portrayed.

For a complete walkthrough on the evolution of this cover you can click Here