Beautiful Books: Laser Quit Smoking Massage

All Lit Up: The cover art of Laser Quit Smoking Massage has a carefree aesthetic to it, a fun energy that complements the witty content of the book. How did you approach this design? Where did you start?

Hiller Goodspeed: This was my first time designing a cover for a book that someone else had written, and so while reading Laser Quit Smoking Massage I made notes of moments that held an aesthetic beauty I could use to inspire the artwork.

In one of the essays there is a line about a fawn traipsing through the freshly fallen snow, which was the kind of thing I was looking for and lent itself to being abstracted. Soon after I painted a handful of asterisk snowflakes and kept them on my desk while I explored other ideas. Later in the week I still thought the winter scene had potential and so I spent more time on it, layering colours and textures to create the artwork that NeWest Press and Co. ultimately chose for the cover of the book.

ALU: We love a good typeface. Tell us about your choices for the cover and the interior.

HG: At one point in my life I considered myself a proficient typologist, though I always leaned heavily towards illustration and eventually grew further and further away from someone who knew much about type. When there’s text in a project I’m working on I will usually draw it, I like it better that way and it makes whatever I’m working on more of a part of myself.

When I was first approached for this project, I thought that drawn type would be a great choice for the cover, even if I had to supply NeWest with a couple Real Type options. Luckily, they did gravitate towards one of the more illustrative covers and discussions began surrounding the design of the rest of the book, which would need to be set in a typeface.

Thankfully Meredith Thompson of NeWest took on the task of designing the interior of the book, which left me to choose a typeface to complement the artwork on the cover. I went with Bookman, which seemed like a comical choice at first but was actually a good fit and looked nice on the cover.

ALU: Because we should give some love to discarded designs, were there other cover designs in contention? How did you settle on this one? 

HG: There were many contenders for the cover of Laser Quit Smoking Massage, several of which never left my desk. I provided NeWest with four different covers, three of which had potential but were discarded in lieu of the more snowflake direction. Which is just the way it is, there is not enough time to fully develop every creative solution.

The ideas for the cover which did not make the cut still held promise. I would have been happy to have spent more time with any one of them and believe that each design could have been worked into a nice cover for Cole’s book. 

Three contending covers for Laser Quit Smoking Massage

ALU: There’s a very cool, quirky DIY style to your artwork. When did you begin creating art? Tell us about your artistic style. How has it evolved over the years? Has your approach to art changed?

HG: I have always created art, from an early age it was the best way I had to express myself and making art was something I usually did. Drawing was my favourite thing to do. I gravitated to collage work and photography when I was a teenager and made art in many different capacities once I realized I could do whatever I wanted.

I am most known for my illustration work, though I create all kinds of things: ceramics, wood things, dioramas. All of my different eras of creation have been different and have been fulfilling in different ways. I have always been compelled to make art, it’s something I will always be doing.

ALU: Are there any artists and illustrators you’re especially loving these days?

HG: There is an ever-flowing fount of incredible, inspiring work out there from countless publishers: Secret Room Press, Goodbye Press, Perfectly Acceptable Press, Caboose Press, Cold Cube Press and individuals Erin Marranca, Madeline Berger, Juli Majer, Mickey Zacchilli, Raf Spielman, Grant Ionatán (html flowers), and so many of the past participants of Zine Harvest here in Vancouver, to name a few.

I am in awe of what other artists are out there accomplishing and putting out into the world. It can be overwhelming. I could talk for a long time about my favourite people producing great work. If we pass on the street stop me and I will tell you about them. 

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Hiller Goodspeed is an artist and illustrator living in Vancouver whose work explores his passing thoughts and experiences. Hiller has self-published many small books and has had a number of books published by others including his most recent book, Pond Life, which was published in 2021 by Perfectly Acceptable Press. Hiller’s most recent project, Da Buzza, is an alternative public transit publication which is distributed using gruella-style tactics.