Impactful Book Cover Design: An Art Director's Perspective

Reading the Manuscript

A course by John Gall , Designer and Creative Director

Designer and Creative Director. New York, United States.
Joined March 2021
100% positive reviews (43)
1,938 students
Audio: English
English · Spanish · Portuguese · German · French · Italian · Polish · Dutch

About the video: Reading the Manuscript

Overview

“You will learn methods for reading a manuscript and how to extract the relevant information needed to start a book cover design. ”

In this video lesson John Gall addresses the topic: Reading the Manuscript, which is part of the Domestika online course: Impactful Book Cover Design: An Art Director's Perspective. Learn how to design meaningful book covers that capture the attention of readers alongside an award-winning designer.

Partial transcription of the video

“ Reading the Manuscript As we've learned about the publishing process, in this lesson, we will learn how to read a manuscript and extract the relevant information to design your cover. A little about my creative process. I adhere to a pretty simple formula, similar to what many designers use. We start with a problem and we define that problem. In this case, we're designing a cover for a book called "Red Pill" by Hari Kunzru. Next, we research the problem. In this case, the research is reading the manuscript. After that, we go into the concept phase. During the concept phase, there may be s...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.


Course summary for: Impactful Book Cover Design: An Art Director's Perspective

  • Level: Beginner
  • 100% positive reviews (43)
  • 1938 students
  • 5 units
  • 14 lessons (1h 38m)
  • 5 downloads
  • Category

    Design
  • Software

    Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop
  • Areas

    Art Direction, Editorial Design, Graphic Design

John Gall

John Gall
A course by John Gall

Teacher Plus
Designer and Creative Director

John Gall is a designer, artist, author, editor, and teacher. He is currently the creative director of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. His design and illustration work for Knopf, Vintage Books, Abrams Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Criterion Collection, and Nonesuch Records has been recognized by the AIGA, Art Directors Club, Print, Graphis, and American Illustration. Known for his book cover designs for authors like Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, and Vladimir Nabokov, his work is featured in the books By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design, and Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World's Great Graphic Designers.

John has written about graphic design covering an array of topics from the history of Grove Press to contemporary skateboard graphics, and is the author of Sayonara Home Run! The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card. He has also been the editor of two bestselling design books: Pretty Much Everything by Aaron Draplin and Sunday Sketching by Christoph Niemann. John is an internationally-exhibited artist and published a book of his personal work John Gall Collages 2008-2018 in 2018. He has served on the board of AIGA/NY, as an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts, and is a frequent lecturer.


  • 100% positive reviews (43)
  • 1,938 students
  • 14 lessons (1h 38m)
  • 23 additional resources (5 files)
  • Online and at your own pace
  • Available on the app
  • Audio: English
  • English · Spanish · Portuguese · German · French · Italian · Polish · Dutch
  • Level: Beginner
  • Unlimited access forever

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Impactful Book Cover Design: An Art Director's Perspective. Design course by John Gall

Impactful Book Cover Design: An Art Director's Perspective

A course by John Gall
Designer and Creative Director. New York, United States.
Joined March 2021
  • 100% positive reviews (43)
  • 1,938 students