Present Imperfect

Jez Burrows was interviewed. | July 16, 2008

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to the 2008 Penguin Design Awards with the description “Jez Burrows was robbed.” Now, I would never want to take credit for starting an Internet meme. (Because that’s sort of like saying “I started herpes.”) But in this case, I'm proud to have brought a little more attention to someone so very deserving.

After I saw his cover for On the Road, I spent hours poring over Jez’s work. As a result, I discovered that Jez is a writer’s designer. He appreciates the written word, he takes inspiration from it, and he incorporates it into his visual designs in both obvious and subtle ways.

So I did what any self-respecting copywriter/design fangirl with her own sporadically updated, loosely web content-focused website would do: I asked Jez for an interview.

As it turns out, Jez Burrows is also a scholar and a gentleman. I know this because he said so. Not in so many words. Rather, in these...

BRONWYN: After the 2008 Penguin Design Awards were announced, a lot of people responded more favorably to your second-prize-winning cover design for Jack Kerouac’s On The Road than they did to the judges’ choice for first prize. Perusing some comments on the web, I’m finding that many people who loved your entry haven’t read On The Road — unlike the Penguin judges, who have. Do you think it’s more important to craft cover designs for classics that appeal to new readers of these works or to existing fans?

JEZ: I think I’d lean toward appealing to new readers over appeasing old ones, but I think there’s room for a cover that can do both. Those covers for the Penguin Classics Deluxe series (particularly the Chris Ware and Tom Gauld ones) are a good example; they’re beautifully illustrated and finished, to a point where I think they could easily snare both kinds of people.

The submission guidelines for the Penguin Design Award ask you to include “a couple of sentences on which Penguin cover you most admire and why.” What did you say?

I said Derek Birdsall’s cover for Chosen Words by Ivor Brown, but my answer to that question changes literally every time I’m asked. There are too many beautiful covers in Penguin’s history to choose just one. I think the Birdsall cover appeals to the design nerd in me; the one who likes grids a little more than is socially acceptable. There were plenty of covers that showed off just how versatile that famous Marber grid was, but Chosen Words is one of my favourites. That Penguin Classics Deluxe series I mentioned is pretty wonderful, too.

One of your projects, I Am The Friction features “short stories inspired by illustrations” and “illustrations inspired by short stories.” I think people often conjure images associated with stories they read, but do you find yourself conjuring stories associated with images you see?

Not often, no. I enjoy doing it, and I think it made for some interesting results in that book, but it’s not my first inclination when I see really great images.

What is your first inclination? Is it more emotional?

I’d say so. But also practical, perhaps? As I designer I find it quite hard to look at an image without trying to work out how it was made, or why the colour scheme works, or a hundred other things that I might be able to learn from and apply to future work of mine.

You created a set of postcards called “Be Good To Them Always,” inspired by a song on The Books’ “Lost and Safe” album. That song contains a quote from W.H. Auden that appears on your “A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods” print. (I read a review of “Lost and Safe” that misprinted the lyrics of “Be Good To Them Always” as “A culture is no better than its words,” which I thought was a funny little malapropism.) Did you know of the Auden quote first or did the album lead you to it?

No, no. I wasn’t familiar with that Auden poem before hearing that song, but I immediately felt a massive kinship with it when I did. Around that time I’d been starting to think a lot about work involving town and countryside (having moved from a very rural area to a big city to study graphic design), and that poem was a huge catalyst for continuing to explore that idea. I’m still very interested in it. It’s definitely a big part of who I am.

How do you respond to these intersections of literature and music in your design work?

I’m really fascinated by language and peculiar turns of phrase. Sometimes it’ll be short quotes or lyrics — as in “Be Good To Them Always” — and sometimes entire bodies of work, like the Destroyer’s Rubies print I recently put out. That print is by far one of the most satisfying things I’ve worked on. I’m actually planning a series in a similar vein. Indie rock and infographics make pretty good partners, I think. I just started transcribing the next album a couple of days ago.

Your answer to the If You Could project’s central question “If you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be?” was “start writing a novel.” Your response is comic, but what kind of novel would you write?

A commercially dubious one, probably. When I was reading for my final year dissertation, I found a brilliant quote in a very dry book about pop music and semiotics that said something along the lines of “all art aspires to the instancy of music.” I don’t think that’s strictly true, but I definitely sympathise with the idea. I love language and I know it can do incredible things, but if I ever come close to writing something that even barely approximates the feeling I get from music, I’ll be happy.

Who writes the sorts of novels you wish you could write?

As far as writers go, Jonathan Safran-Foer probably comes closest to writing what I wish I was writing. Quaint but not sickly, tricksy but not arrogant, and immaculately detailed — not to mention emotionally exhausting (in the best possible way). Other than that, I’m a McSweeney’s faithful and a longtime fan of Haruki Murakami. I’ve also just recently gotten into George Saunders.