Chris Tobias: I don’t want to say you have kind of emerged from nowhere, but all of the sudden it was like, wow, who is this David Drummond guy? Where did you come from, eh? David Drummond: Most of my work is done for university presses, so I guess it was pretty low on the radar screens for a while. A lot of my covers have won in the AAUP Book and Jacket Show over the years, but that doesn’t really reach a wider design audience. It’s pretty insular. Early on I started submitting covers to CA and AIGA to try and get some attention from the big guys in New York. That strategy was quite successful although I must say the majority of my clients remain university presses. CT: You didn’t get my “eh”–Canada joke. Anyway, what made you go down the book cover road after working in corporate design? DD: I had been working in Montreal doing mostly corporate design with some packaging work, and I just felt creatively at a dead end. I started doing covers at night and on weekends, and I found that I really loved the direct contact with the client and the chance to develop a working relationship. As you know, in big firms it is usually the suits that meet the clients, so it is harder for the designer to develop that kind of rapport. I also think book cover design is a perfect fit for my abilities. A funny story: Towards the end of my career at this Montreal firm, I was giving my kids a bath on a Sunday afternoon and I looked up and my boss’s face was in the window. He had driven out to the country for an impromptu visit. He had never seen my house before. I almost had a heart attack because I knew he would want to see my office, which looked like a small book cover factory. He had no idea how my sideline had taken off. I spent the next two hours steering him away from my office. It would have been a little hard to explain given that I was working for him full time. Many of your covers have that same subtle humor to them. How intentional is that approach and does it come easy to you? DD: When I was working in corporate design, my boss at the time had given me a design book, A Smile in the Mind, which influenced me greatly to begin thinking in a new way. I try and turn a cover brief on its head to see if I can find a new way to express an old idea. Some of these university press books are pretty arcane. University presses seem open to my conceptual approach. Usually they don’t have image budgets, and as long as I stay within their fixed budgets they are open to creative solutions. CT: Do your solutions make you laugh to yourself? I mean on Small Crimes, the missing ‘l’...it made me smile when I saw it. DD: Maybe a little bit. A Smile in the Mind is my modus operandi. The book is worth checking out. CT: Too many publishers want to think literally about a cover’s direction. How do you get them to go beyond that and swallow something conceptual? DD: It really helps to have an art director that will defend the concept when working with the big guys. With university presses there is usually a more simplified approval process. At some of these presses that I have long standing relationships with, my contact will really go to bat for me if they love the concept. DD: New Baskerville, Helvetica, Trade Gothic and Futura. Eighty percent of my covers use these fonts. That is not to say type is not a vital part of my covers’ designs. Because the focus of the cover is the visual concept, type tends to play a supporting role. My approach lately has been really stripped down. I was on the jury for CA this year and the projects that really stood out were the ones that expressed the concept in the simplest and most direct way. CT: That’s interesting. So you don’t think that the type has to reflect the tone of the visual. You would rather let the image tell the story. Is the title, then, more of a caption? DD: Not always. I have certainly done covers where the type takes on a more dominant role. On covers where the image takes the lead, I still spend a lot of time getting the type to work with it to find the right balance. I wouldn’t want the type to read like a caption for the image, and I hope it doesn’t because I do put a lot of time into making the whole thing come together. CT: Talk a little about your work process. How much time do you spend thinking and researching a project, realizing that it varies? DD: I wake up early – 5:00 A.M. Idea generation works better for me early in the morning. I tend to leave the other parts of the job like cover production to later in the day. For idea generation I seem to follow an approach that has worked well for me. I start by asking what the question is. Then I go through design and advertising annuals to see what sparks an idea. It might be a piece of bread with cheese whiz on it that gives me an idea. It really is a mysterious process. If I spend an hour or so and nothing comes, I tend go online and do image searches. You may be searching for one thing and something unexpected comes up. The key part to all this is to ask the right question in the beginning. CT: Do you ever sketch or is it straight from your mind to computer? DD: I tend to start with a list of words. For example I am working on a cover now that is about a dog but can’t show the dog on the cover. I like those kind of problems. How do you show this without showing it? Then I start a kind of free association search of images and see where it takes me. I often get the question, “What made you think of that idea?” My father has Alzheimer’s and when I show him my work, that is the recurring question. I can’t really answer it because I don’t even know myself. I guess it requires a certain amount of blind faith that the ideas will keep coming. CT: I get asked this question often, so I will ask you: How long does it take you to design a set of comps for a particular cover, typically? DD: That is the other question my father always asks me. Things seem to go pretty fast for me, at least for the first round. Maybe half a day for a couple of comps. For some books like that dog book I mentioned, I’ll read the manuscript and just let it stew for a couple of weeks. When I do start comping-up an idea, I kind of engage in brutal self-editing and ditch ideas that don’t work. If I feel I am forcing an idea, that is an indication that I should move on. I remember an interview I saw with an actor on Actors Studio where he said you have to be willing to embarrass yourself when trying things out for a scene. I think that is true in design as well. I sometimes come up with an idea and think, “Naaahh, they won’t go for it.” I almost always send it and don’t really mind if they think, “What the hell is this?“ If it feels a little wrong, it’s probably right. CT: You have had covers chosen for the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers collection as well as the Communication Arts Design Annual for the last several years. When did it kick-in that you were starting to gain some notariety? DD: I guess when I started getting calls from New York publishers and they said they had been following my work for a while. AIGA 50 books/50 covers is the best way to get those guys’ attention. CT: What sets you apart from other book designers? DD: I would have to say that it is the fact that I really eschew elaborate solutions. CT: Can you appreciate more elaborate solutions in other designers’ work? Sometimes. But the ones that really excite me are the ones that use an economy of means with a well executed concept. There is just so much of the other stuff out there. Viewing 9,000 design submissions over three days for the CA Design Annual gives you a real appreciation for designs that keep it simple and clean. CT: What influences have contributed to your design sense? DD: My former boss when I worked in corporate design. I developed this relationship with him where he always wanted to be surprised by creative solutions. He would leave me with a project on a Friday, and I just knew that unless I came up with something unusual and unpredictable, he would be disappointed on Monday morning. It’s interesting that I have replicated this with my cover design clients. They want to be surprised by the solution. That dynamic is really important for me. CT: Does that ever make it hard to just knock-out a cover? I mean is it possible to give every project the same level of energy and creativity? You can’t phone it in with that approach. DD: Great question. It makes it tougher for sure. When you get a difficult brief – and they tend to give me a lot of those – you ask yourself, “Why couldn’t they give me one of the covers that already has an image and just needs nice type?” But in the end I am better off for it. I really do think you have to keep pushing yourself and set the bar high. That is why I enter so many design competitions. The blog is important in that respect as well. I have to feel that I am always doing work that is worth posting or entering in competitions. CT: Who are the book designers you look up to? DD: Too many to list. CT: How many of the books you design covers for do you read? DD: Not that many to be honest. For fiction I usually read the manuscript, but for scholarly books if the brief is good and you have access to catalogue copy, that usually gives you enough. You just need enough to find the hook. CT: Do you find living outside the US to be problematic for you, as far as being away from the art/publishing hub of NYC? DD: Not at all, although living right on the US border helps. The back fence-line is the US border. I have US mailing addresses so my clients don’t have to deal with customs. CT: How many covers do you do that we don’t see or know about because of the final outcome? DD: At one point this fall I had about 50 covers on the go. A lot of them don’t get on my blog or get entered in design shows because they are just not those sort of books. If it is a biography of a Canadian physicist for example, and you have to use a photograph of him on the cover, your options are limited. The solution has to be appropriate for the book. CT: Have you ever walked away from a project because of the direction it is headed? DD: Not really. I tend to hate walking away from a challenge. I have taken kill fees on occasion when we hit an impasse. This happens rarely though. DD: I live on a 140 acre farm. Even though I am going to ride this horse as long as I can, if the economy really tanks and the publishing industry takes a big hit, I have been seriously thinking of turning five acres of my farm into a cranberry bog. Apparently there is more money in cranberries than corn. CT: What else should we know about David Drummond that we don’t already know? DD: I bake a loaf of bread a day and make a really mean apple pie. Christopher Tobias is a freelance book cover designer and writes the Books Covered blog.
CT: I think the first cover I saw of yours that made me stop and check out the credit line may have been Kidney for Sale by Owner. It is the thoughtfulness of the concept and simplicity of the design that makes the reader stop and think, “Oh, I get it.” Almost like a riddle.
CT: I read somewhere that you tend to limit your font choices to four. Why and what are they?
CT: If you weren’t wildly successful at this, what other career choice would you pursue?
