6 lessons on creating breakthrough designs and ideas.

“Past, present, and future are interwoven in each conscious moment-and in the performative reading moment as well. Each fluid interval comprises an admixture of: the memory of things read (past), the experience of a consciousness “now” (present), and the anticipation of things to be read (future).”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

Peter Mendelsund started his life as a classical concert pianist.

Beyond the vanity of it, it’s a tough job and hard life.

Hugely demanding and not very well paid.

In his early 30’s he got married and had a child

And finally, he cracked.

He needed stability and more money.

So, he jumped from piano to design.

Over an 8 month period he trained himself in design.

And then, eventually got a job working for a design agency, specialising in book covers.

Things went pretty well.

15 years later the Wall Street Journal described his work as “the most instantly recognisable and iconic book covers in contemporary fiction.”

His creative vision and principled self belief are awesome.

And his non conforming disruptive designs, generally provide an unfair advantage for his clients.

Here’s a few of his iconic designs.

Amazing, right. He’s great and from one of his interviews, here’s 5 and 1/2 reasons why I love his design philosophy and why it matters.

1. Saleability: He designs to sell, not for awards.

“My job as book designer and art director is predicated on the idea that I will help sell a book, and to the extent that I do that, successfully position a book in the marketplace by making the appropriate jacket for it, I am fulfilling my responsibilities to the publisher.”

2. Distillation: He understands the essence of things and how unlocking that, attracts attention and helps to sell.

“It feels important to me that a book’s cover should not be dissonant with, or oblivious to, the text within. A book cover should be a book’s true face; which is to say, optimally, a jacket or cover will be a kind of visual translation of the book in question.”

3. Sacrifice: He understands the importance of making decisions (strategy is sacrifice) and the power of simplicity.

“The best principle to keep in mind is: keep it simple. Most self-published book covers fail because they are trying too hard. Even design professionals fall into the trap of trying to shoe-horn too much design into one composition. I often tell students “your problem isn’t that you have poor ideas, it’s that you’ve got five ideas competing on the same page at the same time.”

4. Bravery: He recognises the dangers that reside in a culture paralysed by fear of failure and the homogenous soup it creates.

“There are so many books published every year, and so many of their covers look alike. Don’t they? This is, of course, a product of a kind of insularity in the publishing business, the ways in which publishing is an echo chamber. But it’s also a product of a marketing culture that can exist anywhere, which can think of no better methodology than imitation.”

5. Distinction: He understands the danger of safe and actively avoids crowded ideas.

“There is a fundamental fear that underlies many of the decisions made around book jackets; in this market, publishers want covers they think are safe bets — ie covers that are similar to other covers that have worked in the past. Unfortunately, by dictating that designers produce genre-ready, hackneyed, copycat covers, publishers are insuring just the opposite of their intent: they are insuring that a book will get lost amid the clones (or at the very least they are insuring that the jacket won’t be helping to make the sale).

6. Excitingly wrong: Finally, and most importantly, he understands the power of visual tension and dissonance to create attention. He leverages the “excitingly wrong” and it’s marvellous.

I am always interested by anything graphical that strikes me as (this is difficult to put into words) excitingly wrong. There is a cool-factor to certain images that lie just on this side of disagreeable…pictorial effects that make me think “this will bother a lot of unimaginative people.” Whenever I see something like that, a piece of art or graphic design that has that special kind of wrongness about it, I think “I need to do something like this myself.” Attendant to this is always the feeling of “in the future, this will be done a lot.” In other words, today’s ugly is tomorrow’s beautiful.

In a dark world full of fear, risk management and safe bets, we need light.

Peter Mendlesund is bright light.

Follow the light.

Walk into the light

And create more light.