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Beautiful Books: Gaudy Excess, Creating the Posh Lust Cover
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or so they say. Today’s Beautiful Books column embraces the “maximalist” look with Posh Lust by Louis Cabri, published by Vancouver’s New Star Books. Designer Oliver McPartlin takes us through the process of creating a cover that would grab your attention.
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The initial discussions about this project heavily emphasized the idea of tacky, gaudy excess. The term “maximalist” was used more than once, and I seem to remember mentions of Arcimboldo. Food as a motif was part of the process from the beginning.
At first I resisted, acting on the standard, designerly urge to seek out a simpler solution. The colours could be jarring and garish, the concept would strive for cognitive dissonance, but the execution would be sparse and uncluttered. A few early mockups played on text and colour — words laid over top of one another and arrays of anagrams of the title itself, as in version 1. (I had high hopes for Tush Slop, Slut Shop, and Lost Push…)
I played with the hoary typographical tropes of Haute Couture publications, which are always the first thing I thing I associate with Gaudy Excess. We were getting close (see version 2), but simplicity was not quite getting us there. Back to Arcimboldo — back to maximalism.
I think we all had the same direction in mind, but couldn’t quite picture it. Karl Lagerfeld tied up and abused by William Burroughs and Hannibal Lecter in a Ralph Bakshi cartoon of a peyote-fueled S&M session. But, you know, fun.
It all began to come together when Rolf had the idea of meat with cake icing on it. All credit goes to him for that. It took a few tries, but that simple and off-putting juxtaposition was really the genesis of this final monstrosity. I bought some icing for the lettering, took some photos and began with some rough mockups in Photoshop: icing on a slab of steak, on a beef heart (version 3)…. We looked at other options too: icing on dirty pavement, on a crumpled page from an old nudie mag.
I started piling them all into one document, masking out backgrounds, oversaturating colours, adding in some fragments of my own illustrations — a picture was coming together: a sleazy, off-putting, quasi-religious cornucopia of indecency. By 3 a.m. it was close to its final state. I sent Rolf an email to the effect of “Hey, so I know we had a plan in place for this, but I’ve kind of gone out on a limb here just for the hell of it — let me know what you think.” The reply I woke up to the next morning was a one-liner: “Oh, yes — keep going.”
A few tweaks here and there, and we had the final image, in all its depraved glory: version 5.
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Thank you to Oliver and New Star Books for sharing this attention-grabbing cover with us.
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