I like seeing an author’s works designed as a set, and so do the bigger publishers for whom redesigns are a useful way to freshen their back catalogue. This month the Faber edition of Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro provides the template for a redesign of the author’s previous works, with new editions of the seven other novels plus a story collection, Nocturnes. I’ve not read any of these books so I’ll leave it to Ishiguro’s readers to gauge the suitability of the minimal illustrations, although the one for Nocturnes is the kind of visual pun that designers today often search for. The image is explained by the book’s subtitle, “Five Stories of Music and Nightfall”. I’d have been tempted to go the George Hardie route with the illustrations, flattening the colours, adding outlines, and placing that cassette and shadow at forty-five-degree angles. But Hardie’s bold isometrics might seem a little too cartoony for Ishiguro. Faber designer Pete Adlington recounts the thinking behind his covers here.
