The adage may have you believe that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but when the cover happens to be a design created by Ahlawat Gunjan, doing so might be justified.
Having created gorgeous book covers for titles for Penguin, Random House, Faber and Faber, Lars Muller, Quercus, Hachette, Hodder, Harper Collins and Westland (where he was the art director), his design expertise is highly sought. However, outside the industry, he is greeted with incredulity by people who take the physical design of a book for granted. “I hear this a lot!” he says, wryly. “When people ask me what I do and I tell them I’m a book designer, they say ‘Oh, you actually spend time designing a cover?’ And I say, ‘Well, yes’.”
It isn’t just covers though, that Gunjan designs — sometimes it can be an entire book that needs illustrations to complement the text. For instance, he created a series of monochromatic illustrations for Adil Jussawalla’s The Right Kind of Dog, published by Duckbill. “The poetry in the book is very dark, so my designs also had to be dark, to sort of enhance the verses. It took us a few trials because Adil had something (specific) in his mind,” the designer says of the project.
Other highly appreciated projects in his design repertoire include Ritu Dalmia’s latest book, Diva Green, and the series of covers he did for Anita Desai’s books for Random House. The covers for Anita — watercolours with a fragile, ethereal quality that grace titles like In Custody and Baumgartner’s Bombay — were created in collaboration with senior artist Shruti Mahajan, and are indicative of the philosophy underlying Gunjan’s work:
“My work is experimental, I’m always trying for newer perspectives. I feel that my work should invite active participation rather than passive viewing — leave something for the viewer to interpret,” he says.
And if covers are distinctly artistic, then it’s because Gunjan is an artist himself, who often spends spare hours painting. It can be seen in the very “arty collages” he’s put together for Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth and An Atlas of Impossible Longing. “The brief came directly from Anuradha; she was looking for something that offered room for interpretation, depending on the viewer’s personality,” he says.
Not every author is as clear about what they would like the cover of their book to look like (Gunjan counts Anuradha, Adil, Anita Desai and Ashwin Sanghi among the exceptions). Usually, the editor of a particular book — the one who commissioned it and has checked it at every stage — writes out a brief that helps the designer gain an idea of the imagery, style and typography that might be suitable.
Within the space of the cover itself — which includes the front and back covers, the spine and in the case of a dust jacket, the inside front and back as well — there is complete freedom for Gunjan to create. It is within this space that he has to capture the essence of a story or idea that a writer has had hundreds of pages to express. “It is challenging,” he admits. “Having a good design education certainly helps because you are trained to understand your clients and trained to sort of pulp or juice someone’s writing and boil it into one visual. It’s entirely dependent on your level of maturity, understanding of design and having a very clear sense of communication.”
Imagery and typography (“with strength and clarity”) are the tools with which Gunjan communicates. “For fiction, non-fiction or a biography or a political work, getting the typography right is paramount,” he explains. “One wouldn’t use a curly font for a book on, say, Narendra Modi. The marriage has to be right,” he says.
With books moving from print and into the “e” realm, does this Glasgow School of Art alumnus see the role of design evolving as well? “The medium will change but the design requirement won’t,” he says. “What will change probably is the outcome of the product. Some fonts and colours are meant for print, others for Web. But print or digital, the designer’s role will stay the same.”
