The Worst Years fo Your Life
Designer: Catherine Casalino
The more you read about this project, the more appealing it becomes. Catherine does a great job showing us the craft of working off the computer—It's not always necessary, but when done well it shows itself to be a unique piece. This was a very well thought out cover. It was also great to hear about some of the people that (whether they knew it or not) contributed to the end design. Dissecting always creeped me out a bit.
—Jason Gabbert
I was really excited when Michael Accordino assigned THE WORST YEARS OF YOUR LIFE to me while I was working at Simon & Schuster. It had such a great, relatable title (even though it had a TON of cover copy). You can’t help but think of all the things you hated about what were supposed to be “the best years of your life.”
For me, the two worst things about those middle school/ high school years were Science class and Science tests— so I set up the cover as if it were some terrible test involving dissection (fill-in-the-blank/label-the diagram). I drew the frog myself. I think the last time I drew anything was in middle school, so my amateurish drawing was pretty much exactly what I would’ve done had I been asked to sketch a frog back then. One of the stories in the collection takes place during a frog dissection, so that was the jumping off point—most of my concepts come straight out of the text.
I tried a few versions combining other images with the frog (I scanned pages out of my mom and dad’s middle school yearbook) but eventually the frog on its own won out. Luckily, everyone (author, agent, publisher, etc) was on board with the design, so there weren’t really any significant revisions like there can be with book design.
I had a few arrows on the cover and one day one of the other art directors at S&S, John Fulbrook, came into my office and saw the comp up on my wall. He drew an arrow pointing to the frog’s crotch. It was so perfect that I kept it.
My friend, Matt Thomas, was kind enough to type up all the contributors’ names on his Underwood Standard typewriter, circa 1947. I had been searching for a good typewriter, when, out of the blue, Matt sent me something in the mail typed on his Underwood. The nice heavy letters were exactly what I’d been unable to find with newer typewriters. I used photoshop to make it ditto-machine purple.
The entire back ad and spine is done in pencil on notebook paper. The only thing that’s not hand-done is the barcode. It took forever and every time there was a type correction it had to be redone, but I’m glad Michael encouraged me to do it. I was fortunate to be able to extend the concept to include the whole cover and not just the front.
8.17.08 // Brandon Hill said:
I feel like kind of a tool for adding praise to this cover like every other designer, but it's just brilliant, simple and hilarious. I need to just own it.
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8.18.08 // Maia said:
The spine is perfect! I've seen this cover many times online, but always just the front panel, never the spine. Spot on!
Wonderful work. Thanks for sharing more about the process. I'm very happy to hear that the 1947 Underwood is still going strong...
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8.17.08 // >Arthur said:
It is awesome to see hand done work. I think I would do more but I haven't drawn since middle school either and sad to say mine would not come out as good as Catherine's.
I just got a Underwood circa 1947 or around that time and its pretty awesome. I have only used mine in photography for a brochure but it still works also.
I am kinda surprised that this was the only real concept but it is awesome. That frog is definitely having the worst years of his life too.
