Mindscape In Cyberspace

Book Cover: Ceiling of Clouds
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Being an avid reader of Bengali poetry and an Bengali literature enthusiast, I always take special interests in the design initiatives that are related to Bengali literature and language. I have designed covers and illustrations for many Bengali poetry collections, novels, short story collections, literature magazines and other similar Bengali publications. Though, I always enjoy working for Bengali books and magazines, I often get really excited if I am working on books that are written or edited by my favorite Bengali authors and poets.

All the covers featured in this post are for poetry collections or novels written by my favorite Bengali authors and poets. It was more than mere professional satisfaction, when I received accolades for these covers from the writer or poet, himself. Quite natural for a designer who loves literature, isn’t it?

Book Cover: The Other Side of the Bread
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Book Cover: Eh Lulu!
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Book Cover: A Roof over Every Head [IRASEC]
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Based in Bangkok, the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC) is a member of the network of research centers of the French Foreign Ministry. They were looking for an overall visual identity for their next series of studies on different political and economical issues of South East Asia. They often used real-life photographs of objects from the region being written about, which failed to give any idea about the exact cartographic location to the global readers. They also needed an identity that stood out from conventional covers using photographs. I decided to use drawn illustrations for the covers for their publications.

For the cover of the book on housing policies of Singapore - “A Roof over Every Head”, I used the conventional idea of a metropolitan skyline with high-rises, tweaking it substantially it by imparting a hand-drawn texture suggesting the thickness and solidity of built form.

More details about this book can be viewed here

When a group of scholars and academics involved with a publishing initiative that seeks to bring out significant works on political theory, approached me to design covers for their upcoming publications, I was genuinely very excited. Their approach demonstrated a disregard for the cover and visual identity of the publications. Portraits of writers independently done by recognized illustrators were used, with a conventional serious color scheme of gray-blue, irrespective of the subject of that particular publication. They needed covers for two of their next publications emphasizing the content.

The Paradox of Freedom
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For the first book, “The Paradox of Freedom” my challenge was, how do I express the idea of “paradox” in the context of India’s freedom from British rule, and its emergence as a nation? How do I assemble these ideas with the writer’s strong Marxist viewpoint? I decided to use solid bold text to form a puzzle-like complex structure with flipped and interlinked letters, randomly filled in with the familiar saffron, green and white of the Indian flag. Approximating the look and texture to that of the Soviet propaganda posters, I used the communist red for the background to suggest a Marxist reading. The result was quite effective.

Revolution by Consent
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Designing acover for the second book - “Revolution by Consent” was more challenging for me. How to communicate an abstract idea like ‘consent of the people’? How to represent revolution graphically? I started working with the idea of the mass and abstracted it through a set of hands raised as if in protest signifying a revolution. A closer look at the gesture of the hands in silhouette demonstrates that instead of protest, the hands represent consent or agreement to a cause. The cause is the backdrop - the first few words of the Preamble to the Indian constitution. The red color seeping into the Preamble represents the Marxist framework used to read these historical events.