by Kazuo Ishiguro,
published by Faber & Faber, £16.99
designed by Justus Oehler
QN: The first question you have to ask is, why on earth did you use Rotis as a typeface?
JO: It’s an awful typeface. We do so many covers, not every single one is studied carefully. You develop a sense of how far you can go [with each design]. In this particular case, it was driven by the author. He wanted to fuse two images; a ballroom scene during the 1920s and a street scene in Shanghai. We tried these in various ways, overlapping, collage, and eventually we ran out of juice, it just kept coming back [rejected by the publisher]. I think [the finished cover design] is very mannered. Spontaneously, I would never have come up with anything like that. To answer your question about the typeface, we had that white space and had to pick an intelligence typeface that had an Asian feel to it.
QN: The reason I think it looks Asian is because it is in red and it is an Asian guy’s name.
JO: Yeah, but if you had set that in a condensed font it would not have looked very Asian.
QN: Well I don’t know, it might have looked very Hong Kong.
JO: No, I think you needed that [points to the spiky serif on Rotis]. [It looks like] a bit of bamboo.
QN: I like the fact that the whole illustration is repeated in a small scale on the spine.
JO: We are now talking about packaging, not just the front cover, but consideration for the spine and the back, and the choice of paper, what happens when you open the book…
When We Were Orphans
An unusual detective story set in 1930s England. Its narrator looks back on his Shanghai boyhood, and his lost parents. His ruminations on his past, and his inability to speak freely of his feelings puts you in mind of the butler hero of Booker Prize-winning Remains of the Day.
Book synopsis edited from The Guardian
- Industries in this article
- Brands in this article
