Special edition: Covered! with Rachel Hyman & Angela Protzman for DEAR S.
Enjoy this interview between Rachel Hyman and designer Angela Protzman, who made the gorgeous cover for Rachel’s Dear S., out now from Big Lucks. You can reach Angela for design inquiries at: [email protected]
Rachel Hyman: I basically sent you the manuscript with not a lot of direction, apart from Big Lucks' style guidelines, and was like "uhhh work your magic please." How did you generate design ideas? What was the process like that got you from reading the manuscript to creating mockups?
Angela Protzman: I wanted to be able to reflect some of the feelings I got from the poems in a visual way, which can be particularly difficult when you need to portray things that aren't explicitly visual. There's a lot of imagery throughout Dear S. Some visualizations seem obvious at first, but then it becomes hard to describe the picture you get in your head because so much of it is just feeling- it was difficult to settle on ideas that would end up trying to represent an entire chapbook's worth of these feelings. I ended up coming up with a variety of illustrations in my attempts.
RH: I had such a hard time choosing just one from the original mockups you sent. I felt like they all captured slices of the chapbook in a different way. Which was your favorite of the ones that didn't make the cut, and why?
AP: One of my favorites was an illustration of an old peach with a moth crawling on it- there are several moments in Dear S that point to finding beauty in the regular / in life and death at all stages. Another favorite ended up being kind of a nod to an illustration NASA sent up with the Voyager spacecraft in '77- a chart attempting to show where our Sun exists in our galaxy, in case anyone new to humankind ever finds it. I simplified the diagram and replaced all the binary notes with dashed lines (turns out someone's fixed a calculation since then, anyway) for one of the cover options. It felt like a connection that made sense with some of the feelings in Dear S, of being so big and so small and having very little tangible control over any of it... besides trying to record it, and saving what we do know for the unknowns in the future, and sharing it however we can.
RH: I had no idea that one mockup was a reference to a NASA thing. So cool. I love it even more now, and your interpretation of it. Can you talk about some projects where your client or partner had more rigid requirements than the ones you've had for my and Banango's projects? How do you maintain creative freedom while still turning out a product that both sides are happy with?
AP: This is a tough question to answer- mostly because the less creative freedom I have for a project, the more likely I'm contractually obligated not to talk about it. Those kinds of projects usually come from full-time employment, when I have to design within strict guidelines that depend on what the client or product already have established. Usually, they want to sell or bring awareness to something, so as the designer it's your job to try and accomplish their goals while keeping your creative integrity.
In the end, nobody can force you to represent anything in any particular way. Even with the worst restrictions, I could usually come up with at least a few options I could get behind that a client could then choose from. Sometimes it takes months of back-and-forth to reach a compromise, but that usually just means coming up with more options I like, to get to a design they also like.
RH: As a designer, do you often notice the covers of books, chapbooks, etc.? How does it influence the way you approach a text, if at all? Do you have any favorite designers/covers you'd like to mention? (I really love Alban Fischer's work myself).
AP: I do notice covers although I try not to judge too hard by them, mostly because there's so many great books and chapbooks with terrible covers out there, or even without covers entirely. I'm pretty fond of unofficial covers- The Fox is Black used to hold these contests for re-covered books and I'm pretty into that idea (and should probably look for similar ones now that I'm thinking about it again). I really like seeing what people who are fans of a particular work come up with in attempts to represent classic stories that already have such iconic imagery.
Alban Fischer is fantastic- If I had to pick favorites of covers he's done, they'd be the ones where he shows off what he can do with collage (like some of the ones for Curbside Splendor and the cover for Birds LLC).
Some favorite covers/cover artists: Daniel Clowes, Rodrigo Corral, the cover for Dry: A Memior (Augusten Burroughs), the cover for The Man Suit (Zachary Schomburg)
RH: Design aside, what have you been reading/watching/listening to lately that's caught your fancy?
AP: The Summer is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved by Joey Comeau was a pretty fun horror read- I'm one of those people who buy into Halloween and get into all the campy stuff at the end of the year in general. Nathan for You, Rick & Morty, and Steven Universe have to be my favorite shows on television right now.
Music-wise, Hop Along's new album is pretty excellent and I don't think I'll ever get over any of their older ones. Parquet Courts is on tour right now and I'm missing every single stop- Light Up Gold has got to be one of my all time favorite records and I can't wait to get a chance to see them play live. I also try to keep up with the bands on Exploding in Sound- I don't think they've signed anyone on that I haven't been able to get into/fall in love with completely.
