We searched for just the right room interior to express this. In Transit, the narrator has returned to London where she’s bought a dilapidated council flat that needs major renovations. And unlike the jacket for Outline, which seemed to require an image of the outdoors, Transit wanted quite the opposite. For the final version of this jacket we were asked to choose a rougher photo of the sea in a shade closer to The Aegean-both good notes from the publisher. Our center layout, here, ultimately inspired the series-look. While we liked this idea conceptually, it just didn’t match up with the sophistication of Cusk’s fine, observational voice. There are 10 chapters in all, and we drew the narrator diving between Roman numerals. While photography seemed right for this uniquely stark novel set in Greece, we also explored an illustrated idea that riffed off the book’s table of contents (or “outline”). We hoped to capture an abstracted “sense of place” with our jacket design. For the magazine we’d commissioned lush illustrations from artist Samantha Hahn, and while everyone agreed that they’d been successful, FSG wanted to take an entirely different approach. The Paris Review serialized Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline prior to the Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover edition, so I’d already had a chance to read it in my role as Art Editor at The Review. So whether it be a book cover, a layout for a publication, or a website page, we’re able to push one another towards a finished product that we’ve each significantly contributed to. And while our visual sensibilities have always been mostly aligned, we bring different strengths to our work. Then we hammer out multiple solutions we want to explore, and we each feel comfortable passing the work back and forth, from sketch phase to finish. Once we’ve both read a manuscript, Claire and I will talk about the central themes of the book and the passages that we found most meaningful. While it’s not at all typical for trade cover designers to work in pairs, it’s incredibly refreshing to share both ideas (and files) with someone whose sensibilities I’ve known and trusted for two decades. Many of our clients are in the publishing industry.
Claire has also spent many years focused on bookmaking, first as a cover designer at Vintage Books and then as a designer of art books at Studio Blue in Chicago. Together we formed our Brooklyn-based, multidisciplinary design studio, Strick&Williams. In 2014, after fourteen years working as an in-house designer turned art director for the renowned literary publishing house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I joined forces with my longtime art school friend and frequent creative collaborator, Claire Williams Martinez.
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