Print Is Not Dead
Talking with designer Matthew Jacobson about book covers, records and music, DIY sensibilities, magic, and more
I’ve written a lot about interior, object, and furniture design over on Sight Unseen, but graphic design remains something of a mystery to me. Especially book design. How to translate a feeling, an atmosphere, a tone – along with necessary information – into a visual language on paper. How to capture all of that on the page the way a writer attempts to with words.
So I’m incredibly lucky to know Matthew Jacobson, a Chicago-based designer who puts such care and intelligence into his work. He has a long, storied history designing album covers at record labels, but of course, he’s also applied his skills to other areas. He came up with something so distinctive, smart, and delightful for my forthcoming book, Watching the Detective, which ostensibly has to do with watching Columbo but becomes a kind of investigation into a lot of other things, too.
Herewith, exhibits A-D!
I love how the letters in the tie on the front fit together like puzzle pieces – the book is something of a puzzle, in the way that, you know, life is. And there are some surprise elements you can’t see here, they’re in the French flaps – you gotta wait for the actual thing. Matthew also designed the cover for Donato Loia’s 1095 Short Sentences, the second book published by B-Side Editions, the small press I started in order to put out my last novel, Consolation. All I told Matthew for this one was that maybe it could somehow reference Columbo’s iconic raincoat. And while I know I said graphic design is a mystery to me, I do have a strong sense of the aesthetic I want for B-Side Editions: an abstract, somewhat minimal style that favors shapes and lines and carries over from book to book.
I wanted to know a little more about what Matthew does and how he does it. And I thought you might, too. So I asked him a few questions via email . . .
You ran an indie record label and you've done a good deal of work for musicians like Jack White and Spoon – album covers, posters, creative merch like playing cards. What role does music play in how you design? I mean, from the literal: Do you listen to music while you work? (And if so, what?) To the more abstract: Does designing feel at all musical to you? Are you conscious of the ways that movement and rhythm and a sonic quality are present in your work?
MJ: Yes, I founded the indie label Le Grand Magistery in 1996 with two goals: give musicians wider exposure and design their records. Over time, the less glamorous parts of running a label (accounting, mailings, logistics) took over, but design was often the part that excited me most.
I’ve designed more individual pieces for Jack White and his bands (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and artists on his Third Man Records label) than for anyone else. In almost every case, I’m listening to the music while I design. Sometimes that isn’t possible. For instance, when Beck recorded a single at Third Man Records in Nashville while I was Head of Design, I hadn’t heard the songs before starting the cover art. I ended up loving the design (I even have it framed in my office), but I know it doesn’t quite reflect the sound. Normally, my guiding principle is that you should be able to judge a record by its cover.
With Spoon (and Britt Daniel’s other band, Divine Fits) I usually hear everything from demos to final masters during the design process. I’ll put the songs on repeat and immerse myself until the visuals feel like they live inside that same sonic world.
So yes, to your first question: when I’m designing for music, I listen to that music, and only that music. Never anything else. For example, I won’t listen to a Scott Walker record while designing a Spoon record.
When I’m designing other things that don't necessarily have music attached to them (e.g., books, logos, packaging) I mostly work in silence, or I’ll put on instrumental music I don’t know well so I don’t get distracted by words and stories. Michael Nyman's music is a good example of the sort of thing I can listen to while working.
As for the more abstract part of your question, designing rarely feels like making music to me, since I don’t play an instrument. But it does give me a kind of high. There is rhythm, movement, and even silence in a visual composition, much like there is in a musical one. But just as with running a record label, the work is never only about the highs. There are also the tools, the templates, the math, and the logistics that go with it.
You're also a magician! From childhood, though you still perform on occasion. Does graphic design feel like a magic trick? (Because it seems like one to me).
MJ: My ideal is that every design carries some element of magic or wonder. A wink. A smile. A laugh. A discovery. The act of designing itself doesn’t feel like performing magic to me, though in a sense I am making things appear out of nothing. What matters most to me is that the finished piece has a touch of the unexpected, something that feels a little magical.
In Watching the Detective there’s a hidden reveal on the back cover and inside flap. The sleeve for 1095 Short Sentences is a bit of a visual puzzle that may not make sense at first, but once it does, there’s that spark of recognition and joy.
Speaking of your old record label, Le Grand Magistery, you're no stranger to the world of DIY – the ethos and the hustle, the drive to put things you believe in out into existence, and balancing it all with other work. I'd love to get your perspective on that. To me, it seems even more important, these days, to create these kind of alternative, very human-centered ecosystems.
MJ: I learned DIY from the ground up running Le Grand Magistery. It taught me the ethos and the hustle: you (and your friends and/or family) imagine the work, make the work, sell the work, ship the work, and somehow balance it with everything else on your plate.
As the saying goes, there are no small parts, only small actors. Side hustles and small projects can matter just as much as the big ones—sometimes even more. I always try to put everything into everything. It’s hard for me to do anything halfway, even when I probably should. For example, the last Jack White poster I designed (for his show in Detroit) began with me designing just three buttons, but by the end I had designed more than 130. Nobody asked me to do that, but I felt it would make the project more impactful:
In the online world, people celebrate launching with an MVP as in “minimum viable product.” I prefer to think of MVP as “most valuable product.” In design, marketing, and music you often only get one chance to make a lasting impression. Ad campaigns, book covers, albums, and other cultural artifacts are judged at launch. You rarely get the time or budget to fix what you wish you had done differently, and by then it’s usually too late anyway. That makes the first release crucial, and it pushes me to treat every project, no matter the size, with the same care.
I do appreciate the possibilities of new tools, including AI, but humans are where it’s at. The human-centered ecosystems that small, independent projects create feel more meaningful and resilient than generic scale-at-all-cost platforms. Those connections are why I keep doing DIY work. However, I also love working within large organizations, where skilled collaborators of every stripe pull together toward a shared goal. But in the end no matter the size of the team, like Soylent Green, it’s people.
And tell me (because I'm both curious and self-centered): How did you come up with the concept for the cover of Watching the Detective? Is the process different when you're working on a book cover?
MJ: It was important to me that Watching the Detective, the third release on B-Side Editions, felt like part of the family. It needed its own identity, but to still fit within the series. As with everything I design, I try not to “decorate” for decoration’s sake but to design in service of the narrative. The cover should feel like the book, or at least draw directly from it.
I don’t believe I have a personal style that runs across my body of work. My job as a designer is to visualize the style of the world you (as the author) have created. That’s no different from what I do with music. The cover has to live inside the world that it encases.
You had mentioned Peter Falk’s raincoat as something possibly worth reflecting in the design. While looking at photos of Falk as Columbo, the idea came to me of forming his tie out of the book’s title text. From there I hand-drew (with digital tools) each letter in the title and in your name, and built the look and feel of his wardrobe with just a few simple shapes.
For the spine and other elements (the back cover and the inside flaps) I was thinking about how Columbo once solved a case by studying a typewriter ribbon. So all of the text is written in a typewriter font. It just made sense. If someone walked into Columbo’s office and asked, “Why is all the text typed out with a typewriter?” he’d know the answer instantly, without the need for investigation.
Oh, and one more thing…
This isn’t really about design, but long before I moved to Chicago I was hooked on a song about the city by Cath Carroll. It’s called True Crime Motel, which sounds like the kind of place Columbo might wander into. :)
THANK YOU, MATTHEW! (I’m using all caps, as if this were a text from my dad, because that also has to do with the new book).