Greetings fellow design geeks! My name is Scarlett Foster, and I am a family friend of Tyler’s, dating back to the mid-1970s when I went to college with her parents Penny and Tim. I’ve had no formal art training, so my journey into the world of art, architecture and design has been a self-taught adventure over the last four decades. Fortunately, there’s something new to appreciate at every turn!
As I pondered my Friday Finds assignment, I thought of how to combine my passions for reading and wine with design. There is a common theme, as the saying, “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” applies equally to books and wine. Ironically, armed with little else but visual clues, we often choose both by their graphic appeal.
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BuzzFeed has compiled this list of the 22 most iconic book covers — Who can argue with classics like the hand of the puppeteer on the cover of "The Godfather?”
I turned to my own bookcase to see what drew my eye beyond those listed in this link. First up, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" by John Berendt, jacket design by Carol Carson, cover photo by Jack Leigh. The Bird Girl statue, imitating the scales of justice, set against a backdrop of Spanish moss and tombstones, screams of place and plot.
The cover of "A River Runs Through It" by Norman Maclean also speaks to place. The wood engravings and watercolor are by Barry Moser. But if you pass by this book because you think it’s a guide to fly fishing, you will miss the underlying currents of family dynamics. Moser misses neither in his cover art.
Book series present a particular design challenge, as the cover must provide continuity to the devotée and intrigue to the potential new reader. The alphabet series by Sue Grafton, featuring detective Kinsey Millhone, is a particular favorite of mine. As I pulled out her books, I noticed a design change from "L Is for Lawless" to "M is for Malice," both designed by Raquel Jaramillo. In 1995," L Is for Lawless" was Grafton’s first novel to reach number one on the New York Times Best Seller list. At this point, the series stood on its own, and the cover design no longer needed to hint at the story line. The singular letter sufficed, and continued to do so through “Y Is for Yesterday,” her last before passing away in December 2017.
The covers of children’s books are designed by the illustrators, and thus the design style to be found within is obvious. My childhood favorite was “Harold and the Purple Crayon” by Crockett Johnson, who also illustrated the comic strip Barney. The cover promises a magical journey, with the limitless possibilities of one crayon color. Harold had a strong pull on our family. My sister felt compelled to color outside the boundaries of purple, and when I asked her as an adult why she did so, she answered, “Harold told me to do it.” That’s a testament to the power of great design.
The perfect segway from books to wine is Wine Folly, the book and web site created by Madeline Puckette and Justin Hammack. A certified sommelier with a background in graphic design, Puckette translates the complex world of wine into modern graphical representations that turn the casual wine drinker into a tasting room savant. She is not only my favorite wine writer, but also my current design hero. Clean, clever and current. Puckette breaks down the complexity of wine labels with graphic ease here. The labels I find to be most graphically appealing, though, are those from the New World, which are not constrained by regional labeling laws.
Often, the typeface alone signals the wine buyer. Such is the case for both L’Aventure and Sea Smoke, which combine elegant type with significant use of white space to convey refined, balanced wines. The upward stroke of L’Aventure calls to the forward motion of adventure; while the “S” shaped swirls around Sea Smoke evoke the fog that rolls over the vineyards from the Pacific Ocean.
Graphic representations of the elements of winemaking also abound. Matthiasson Wines uses pruning sheers in different configurations and numbers to evoke the handcrafted nature of these small-batch wines. Tapiz Winery’s Black Tears malbec graphically recreates the “legs” or “tears” that drape the interior of a wine glass from a high viscosity (typically higher alcohol) wine, such as the purple hued malbec.
But let us not forget the French, and the Châteauneuf du Pape region in particular. Here, the label is defined by region and by law. What is so graphically fascinating is less the label, but the bottle itself. Châteauneuf du Pape translates to “new house of the pope,” and speaks to the 14th century, when the papal seat was temporarily moved to Avignon in the Rhone Valley. Each bottle of CNDP has an embossed representation of the papacy — from the keys of St. Peter to the pope’s mitre. One quick glance or touch telegraphs what’s within. Which brings us back to a book. In Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman In Moscow,” the Bolsheviks have removed all labels from wines in the cellar of the Metropol hotel in an effort to make all wine equal — either white or red. But the aristocratic Count Rostov, exiled for life in the Metropol, knows the secret of the Châteuneuf. “Reaching down to a shelf at the height of his knee, the Count carefully took a bottle from among the thousands. Holding it up with a wistful smile, he ran his thumb over the insignia of the two crossed keys that was embossed on the glass.” Thus, he is able to preserve his tradition of raising a glass of Châteauneuf du Pape to his sister’s memory on the anniversary of her death.
