Jackets Required

By Fwis -- Publishers Weekly, 7/31/2007 3:00:00 AM

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This is the latest installment in a weekly column by Fwis, a graphic design group that blogs on book jacket design. The Fwis designers judge a recent book by its cover each week on PublishersWeekly.com.

Title: One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding

Designer: Evan Gaffney

Author: Rebecca Mead

Publisher: The Penguin Press

The modern American wedding costs an average of $23,000. It has 168 guests who give 100 gifts that cost $85 each. This comes out to a net loss of $13,860 for the couple on the commencement of their life together. And yet happy couples nationwide continue to insist on the biggest, most intricately exhaustive wedding that they can possibly afford, or at least sponge from their respective parents.

It is seldom that you see a cover which so perfectly and stylishly expresses the contents of its book as in this design for One Perfect Day. The manner in which it so rudely interrupts itself through the simple means of an elegant juxtaposition of color and type perfectly reflects the emotion and frustration involved in this most romantic of days. Mr. Gaffney himself tells us how "it was my good fortune that both weddings and shopping possess unique typographic conventions that could be pitted against one another," which, along with the embossed staple and the subtle drop shadow, completes an effect perfectly akin to that of the happy couple finally coming home from their honeymoon, only to check their bank account for the first time.

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