Books Are My Business: Jack Smyth, cover/jacket designer
Jack Smyth, graphic designer
Jack Smyth is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Dublin.
He has worked for publishers including Little, Brown and Simon & Schuster and has won numerous awards for his book cover design.
I went to DCU and did a multimedia course, then I went to work at Tower Records in Dublin, they had an art department there.
I was making in-store signage and doing their window displays and I really enjoyed it.
I moved to London to do a masters in graphic design at Kingston University and I got an internship at a publisher and stayed there for nine years.
I fell in love with designing book covers and worked with three publishers over there. I went freelance and moved back to Dublin about a year and a half ago.
For a lot of fiction, the process begins with reading as much of the text as I can or that is available.
You can get an idea really quickly, and it’s one or two visuals, and that’s it.
A lot of that is dependent on my relationship with the publisher or the art director.
Other times, it takes a while to hone in on what’s right for the text and there are numerous iterations.
For example, I did 60 covers for something recently. Often it is a very collaborative process.
My thing has always been that is not about me, the publisher, or even the author, it is about the text, what is in those 300 pages, the words and the characters.
There can be a lot of push and pull — we are living in an increasingly visual world now so the marketing value of the cover is constantly multiplying.
I always try and keep that as bay as best as I can and keep the story, the text or the idea of the book at the core.
I’m one of those annoying people who look forward to going to work every Monday. I feel very privileged to be in a position to play a small part in the publishing of books.
Because I have to read so much for work, the choice about what I am reading is almost removed and I love that.
People send me a manuscript, and it is something I would never pick up in a bookshop, and I become engrossed in it.
I love that in-depth and exploratory reading, it is one of the unsung joys of the work.
A boring but necessary answer to that is the real structural fee issues. Fees for designing a book cover haven’t really changed in 20 years.
You would struggle to think of many other things that have been the same price for 20 years.
On top of that, a lot of publishers are trying to take more of the territory and rights to the work and wrapping it into that same fee.
It is going to be disruptive and create issues but I have to believe that the reason people are drawn to visual work is the same reason they are drawn to books — there is a huge human connection there which is really important.
I also think there is a ceiling of what AI can achieve — so much of creative work is a reflection of life as it happens around us.
I’m a nightmare in a bookshop. You can tell a book cover designer in a bookshop because they want to see what paper stock or finish was used.
We must look like such weird little creeps going around touching all the books. We use book covers hopefully as elegant and accurate navigational tools.
A book cover has got to be an accurate and tonally correct representation of the text but also an emotional compass for someone who is trying to find something in a bookshop.
I remember seeing the first-ever cover for Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, which was designed by Paul Bacon, I was just entranced by it.
There are so many fascinating details about it. There is something about it that never gets old.
Slaughterhouse Five would be one of them. Young Skins by Colin Barrett was a game changer for me, one of those books I was talking about for months afterwards. Weather by Jenny Offill is another one that has really stayed with me.
