Stephen King Series
Designer: Jamie Keenan

Here is a great bit of series work. It seems very difficult to re-brand an author as big as King—an author who's work tends to sell itself. Jamie Keenan in the UK attempted to do such a task, and did a great job. These posted titles are not Keenan's final pieces, but they are close—they got roughed around a tad before they went to print, but the printed finals still look really good. Below are some of Keenan's thoughts.
—Jason Gabbert

Unfortunately the King series doesn't look exactly as it did when I sent it all off to print. The publishers lost a bit of courage and decided to use the second colour a bit more liberally - so on some of the covers the author name is in the second colour and on others there's a tint of the second colour bleeding behind the whole image. So the whole effect was weakened

You can see these on amazon.co.uk.

With the King covers, everything started with the idea that King is a massive author but is still seen in a slightly mass market kind of a way and it was maybe time to broaden his appeal, so that he became something like a modern day Charles Dickens. Extremely popular but still respected and thought of as literary rather than supermarket.

There's no getting round using King's name as big as possible, but as with any tricky brief I always like to try and turn the nastiest part into the best part. So the general idea was to make it look like that was a deliberate design decision rather than something that I was having to begrudgingly work around. So King's name becomes almost illustrative and sets the tone for the rest of the cover while at the same time doing what any other mass market author name in gold foil might do.

The original idea was to restrict the covers to pure black and white and contrast the messed up masthead of King's name with a very slightly spiky, gothic typeface for each book's title but this soon got rejected in favour of a much more commercial typeface and a second colour was then introduced. The idea for the illustrations came from watching a kid's programme called Bear in the Big Blue House. There's a character on the programme called Shadow who recreates traditional stories in a modern way all using cutouts to create shadows and it's all slightly creepy. A lot of King's book are to do with good and evil and people fighting their darker sides, so the black and white theme seemed suitable and flexible enough for a series of twenty to thirty books.

That's about it really. The whole process was pretty straightforward for such an important series.

8.22.08 // The Book Designer said:

What a great series. The simple illustrations and total departure from the usual mass market feel is refreshing and about time.

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2.10.09 // Lucie said:

Jamie is one of the best designers in the UK and to see him do some mass market design is amazing. Even with the changes they are outstanding - in so many ways!