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It can be as much a starting point to getting inducted into a whole new world of understanding yourself and everyone else through a whole new set of eyes. It’s true if one might believe that his words are nothing short of experiencing and thereby practicing spirituality. On the Dalai Lama’s birthday this year in July, Pico Iyer and he had an immersive Q&A session organised by the Jaipur Literature Fest. The Art of Stillness was first introduced as a TED talk a few years ago following which we’ve heard Iyer on various interviews including one with Oprah Winfrey.
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And no, he did not design the cover.Pico Iyer’s words flow like the sinuous path of a babbling brook through a mountainous terrain and bring you closer home, every time you read something by him or better still, have it narrated to you via an audiobook or a podcast.
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He released his first book this month, The Squared Circle: Life, Death and Professional Wrestling. In addition to designing books covers, Shoemaker also writes.
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Find out how to buy The Art of Stillness in print or as an e-book » The Art of Stillness has been selected as an iBooks Notable Book of the Month. It does what we sought to do with the others: to use a landscape to convey stillness, but to frame it in an unexpected way.” This is the cover you’ll see on bookstore shelves. It’s strong, visibly memorable and readable from a distance - and in the Amazon age, it’s important to be readable from a thumbnail. “It was a struggle to get enough of the image to show through, since the title doesn’t exactly form a neat wall of type, but I think it does the job that the others didn’t. “It was someone at TED who suggested that we try to ghost the image behind the type. “Even if that single image was impossible to find.” In the end, the grid design felt closest to what we wanted to convey, but it lacked the power of a single image,” he says. “The type was an effort to make the book look more literary.
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Revision 11.After a few more revisions, Shoemaker reverted back to the image grid. “But I think the question of the self-help-book look still applied, so we didn’t go forward with it.” It certainly conveys stillness,” he says. We returned to this because it has a certain abstract power - it takes a moment to register what you’re seeing, and the horizon line plays off the logo band in an interesting way. “This was the most successful of the single landscapes. When the approach above didn’t quite work, Shoemaker went back to the idea of a single image. One image may look meditative, but with six of them, you absorb what they have in common.” “I had the idea of collaging six of the landscapes to convey the premise by comparison.
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Trial and error proved that using a single image inevitably sent the wrong message,” Shoemaker says. “Everyone liked the idea of a single, almost abstract landscape scene, but it risked looking like a new age book. This cover uses four of the illustrations from inside the book, serene landscapes from photographer Eydis Einarsdottir.
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From his initial batch of designs, here’s the one that seemed to work best. Below, a few of these revisions, with Shoemaker’s insights on how he got to the final cover. In all, Shoemaker created about 40 draft designs for this cover, and did about 25 revisions once he found the right approach. “Some were just type-based, since it’s a strong title.” There were also some deliberately counterintuitive ones-like an antic scribbled circle with vibrating type,” says Shoemaker. “I tried a lot of ideas at the start-straightforward ones, like a statue, a still-life photo, a canoe on a lake. Because the story in this book, written by longtime travel writer Pico Iyer, is about the joy that comes from sitting still, quietly, and reflecting on life. He says, “My job is to ask this question: ‘What do stories look like?’”įor David Shoemaker, the designer who made the cover for the new TED Book The Art of Stillness, this question presented a challenge. OK, it is,” Chip Kidd (a TED Books designer in his own right) gives a wonderfully concise description of what book cover designers do. In his talk, “ Designing books is no laughing matter.