#FreelancerFriday #6 - Tom Sanderson, Cover Designer

#FreelancerFriday #6 - Tom Sanderson, Cover Designer #FreelancerFriday #6 - Tom Sanderson, Cover Designer â€Å"What I’m interested in about book design is how when you get a project and a brief, you’re very much a visual problem solver. You’re trying to turn a load of words, a manuscript, a blurb, an idea, into a visual package in the most interesting and pick-up-able way. Each cover is different - they may look similar in some respects, but the way you approach them mentally is quite different.†Tom Sanderson is a designer based in Brighton. He’s created book covers for just about every demographic imaginable, from children’s fiction through young adult to adult fiction, commercial and literary, and beyond. His full portfolio is at The Parish.REEDSYHow did you get started in design?TOM SANDERSON I went down the art college route. I’ve come from an illustration background. My father’s an illustrator and my mother was a Ceramics teacher. I went to art college because it seemed like the natural place for me to go. I initially did my degree in illustration, and then a postgrad after my degree which is when I got more into the graphic design side of things. I’ve always been interested in books, and I was lucky enough that the college I was at for my MA had a really good bookbinding department, so a lot of my projects were based around that.When I left college I looked for jobs in the publishing industry. Initially I worked as a junior in children’s books. Publishing is one of those industries where once you get into the system it’s a small world. If you work in a company for a couple of years, people you work with move around to other houses and you get to be known by your work. I got to move around on the back of my work from children’s fiction to teenager fiction to adult fiction design, and ended up at Penguin for about five years before going freelance.REEDSY Why go freelance?TOM SANDERSON There was a number of factors. When you work as a designer you get to a stage where you either go down the art director / creative director route, and push down that path where you’re managing people and managing projects and managing departments; or you go the freelance route. Initially I was interested in becoming an art director and did bits and pieces of that. I lived in Brighton and used to commit to London every day; after six years I wanted more of a work-life balance, so I settled in Brighton permanently and now I’ve got a studio here. If I’d stayed in London I probably would have stayed in-house too. But the other negative side of being an art director, for me, is being less hands on with stuff. It’s more about managing projects and managing people. For me my strengths are designing, and I’d miss that if I wasn’t doing it.REEDSY How do you see the creative challenge of designing a cover?TOM SANDERSON What I’m interested in about book design is how when you get a project and a brief, you’re very much a visual problem solver. You’re trying to turn a load of words, a manuscript, a blurb, an idea, into a visual package in the most interesting and pick-up-able way. Each cover is different - they may look similar in some respects, but the way you approach them mentally is quite different.REEDSY Is being pick-up-able more about standing out, or just not ‘blending in?’ Looking at your portfolio, your cover for A Deeper Darkness stood out to me.TOM SANDERSON As you can imagine, there was quite a lot of different approaches to that book because it was so massive. Initially they gave me various thought-starters about the book and how it could work as a visual reference for the cover. So we talked about having piles of burning books and Nazi banners and things like that. We talked about a German street scene, initially doing a lot of visuals of narrow streets with bombed-out buildings, and the type working above that. It wasn’t getting the emphasis that they wanted across, so we brought in the idea of having the girl reading on top, which was a nice way of reflecting what’s going on in the book. Once we had that in place we brought in elements of fire around the edges. The typography was quite simple - we just wanted to make 'The Book Thief’ stand out as clear as possible.REEDSY When an author brings you a project is there anything they can do that helps?TOM SANDERSON It’s helpful to know the kind of books your book is up against. Knowing competitor’s books, knowing the genre is useful. Any visual ideas that they might have are always good to know - it gives you a greater understanding on what you can play with visually. Sometimes by having a conversation with publishers you find ideas you’d never have arrived at on your own.