He is extraordinarily well-read

Who’s the best book designer of our time? My money is on Peter Mendelsund.

He’s a polymath: a classical pianist, an author, a casual philosopher, a painter, the creative director at The Atlantic. And as a book designer, there’s much to admire about his work: his command of typography, his inventive and yet balanced layouts, his thrilling choreography among color and illustration and type on a cover.

Most of all, Mendelsund is remarkably able to bring the spirit of a book to the surface.

As Chip Kidd, his colleague at Knopf, said:

“Peter Mendelsund has the ability to visually and conceptually distill a narrative in such a way that it seems effortlessly inventive, striking, smart, fresh and yet classic. And he does it again and again and again. How I hate him.”

It’s easy to be a fan of his work (and/or despise him for his unrivaled skill). But you could miss the thing beneath the thing, the invisible work that Mendelsund does before attempting any visual design.

What is this magic? How does Mendelsund appear so “effortlessly inventive”? His covers look effortless… and it’s precisely because of the great deal of effort he expends.

His secret? Mendelsund sits down and READS the whole book. Not the summary. Not the publisher’s description. Not the Amazon reviews. The whole thing, cover to cover. And it shows.

As author Tom McCarthy says of Mendelsund, in his foreword to Cover:

“Mendelsund reads backwards, forwards, and askew—most of all, across and through. He is extraordinarily well-read; in an increasingly illiterate culture—and (it must, sadly, be stated) an increasingly illiterate publishing industry—he’s immediately able to hear echoes and cadences of all the other texts burrowing and worming their way through the body of the one in front of him.”

As a designer, Mendelsund’s super-power lies in all of the work he does before he attempts a single sketch.

If you design without understanding the content—its intent, its spirit, its complexity—the end result will suffer.

Explaining his process, Mendelsund says in Cover:

“Finding that unique textual detail that, as the subject matter for a book jacket, can support the metaphoric weight of the entire book, is now the substance of my work. When I read a manuscript now, it is with this unusual task in mind.”

For design to be great, to truly sing, much invisible work is required. Over and over and over again. As he writes:

“Design is not performed. It is, rather, endlessly rehearsed. Designing is like practicing: one iterates; makes amendments; tries new avenues.”

Moving colored rectangles around on a canvas is a pleasant hobby, but it’s not design. There must be an intimacy with the thing itself, with the subject matter, with the underlying object. In this way, great design goes deep beneath the surface.