PAUL BUCKLEY
INTERVIEW BY DOUG PERKUL | permalink | posted August 20, 2008

Paul Buckley is the VP Executive Creative Director of Penguin Books

You are responsible for managing the entire team of designers at Penguin. How do you find it possible to work on design projects yourself when wearing such a large managerial hat?
Finding time to do my own cover design has its costs. I do get to cherry-pick which titles I work on, yet I am sometimes jealous of my own designers as they get to spend most of their day literally designing, and I have to wait till after six when everyone has gone home. I have a large staff (twelve people) and between working with each of them and our many editors, I have people walking into my office every five minutes. Call me any weeknight around 10 P.M. and there is a fair chance that I will be in my office plugging away. As a result, it is necessary for me to turn down most freelance projects and to frequently bribe my wife, Ingsu, with very nice meals.

In our opinion, so many people do judge a book by its cover and it is imperative that a book not only stand out but also fit with the book’s content and spirit. That said how do you go about selecting the “right” artist with each project?
There is no “right” artist. I don’t think in life there is any one “right” anything. For me, the saying “there are many ways to skin a cat” holds true for just about everything. There will always be more than one visual artist whose visual voice will match an author’s writing voice—be it designer, illustrator or photographer. Often it comes down to a nice serendipity where I am talking to, or viewing the work of a certain artist at the same time I am trying to solve a certain cover and something just clicks in a wonderful way. Of course the fact that I view so much work in a single day helps in this regard. The trick is to always be looking for these connections. Panic helps as well.

With music, cover art has lost much of its magic as consumers now swap so much digitally that they often never get to experience the cover design With the arrival of the Kindle and digitization of books, could jacket art be the next victim?
Also, album covers, with their large canvases, no longer exist. And record companies let bands art direct and design their own CD covers. Praise be the 6 x 9 inch book cover, and authors that actually prefer to write rather than design some embarrassingly bad book cover. Regardless of what format you are reading a book in, I prefer to believe that publishers, authors and ultimately audiences will want a cover image to visually individualize the reading experience.

Often I find myself loving a book jacket and then the movie based upon the book comes out and the artwork is replaced with an action shot from the movie or a huge picture of the star. I understand why this is done, but “artistically” this is kind of pathetic. How does one balance art vs. commerce when at the end of the day? Is it all about selling books?
Yes, of course it is about selling books. If my cover cannot persuade people to pick the book up, then that author does not get heard. But the point is to do it with distinction, integrity, and to try to intrigue the potential customer, rather than scream at them over the bookshelves with the loudest, nastiest type I can lay my hands on. Whispering is not the answer either. Does that mean motion-picture companies should keep on perpetuating the same hackneyed formula they have been shoving down our throats for so many decades now? Hell no. Its the same with movie opening  / closing sequences – it is as if they spend a fortune crafting a drop-dead gorgeous movie and then go out of their way to hire agencies that have no respect for type and design to package it all. It is so incredibly sad, and the reason why when we do see a beautiful movie poster or a well-thought-out title sequence, it’s so jarring and memorable.

There are hacks in every industry and I get the sense that in the movie industry, far more than anywhere else, it’s the “if it worked for them, lets just play it safe and do the exact same thing” syndrome—it sort of infuriates me as movies are one of mass culture’s main sources of design, and they keep it all so dumbed down and hacked out. I firmly believe the everyday book buyer and the everyday movie viewer appreciate strong, beautiful, distinctive design… and god help me, as hokey as I know this will sound, the world would be a more beautiful, more intelligent, happier, more playful place if there was better design everywhere. Hacked-out design is visual pollution.

What projects do you have currently in the hopper that we should know about?
A new improved, friendlier, more personable demeanor—spread the word!