Closing Statement
December 4, 2019
To write a closing statement for The Frontispiece is nearly an impossible task. Even four years into the company, I’m not certain I know exactly what it is. As we’ve written in the past, the job of a book designer is to play host to several different identities at once. To define an agency specializing in book design, therefore, is even more nebulous. Conversations often go like this: “So what do you do?” I’m a book designer. “Oh, so … the covers?” Well, yes and no. I do design covers, but I also design the interior pages and other elements of the book that you wouldn’t think of. “Wait, someone designs the interiors of books?” Yes. “My mother-in-law wrote a book, what do you charge to design one?” *slowly walks away*
BJ Soloy’s Our Pornography and Other Disaster Songs (Slope Editions, 2019)
Running our own agency has given us the freedom to design what we want and for whom. We’ve worked with a wide variety of clients, from large publishing houses to independent authors, on projects for which we were given varying degrees of creative control. All were rewarding in their own way.
Melissa Knox’s Divorcing Mom (Cynren, 2018)
One of our first assignments was designing K–5 common core mathematics textbooks for Zearn. We designed over 40 textbooks for them in our first two years. As an indication of our range of work, our official last project is the identity system and editorial design for Precipice Magazine (nsfw). Somewhere in between, we designed over 300 books, including the bestselling Analog Trilogy by Eliot Peper (47 North, 2018) and the entire first season of books from Cynren Press.
Precipice Magazine, Valarie Merced, ed. (2019)
In 2019, we moved from our established home in Kansas City to San Francisco to pursue other opportunities in design. Emma and I started new jobs in publishing—she as an art director at Callisto Media and me as the book designer at Stanford University Press. In these roles, we continue our pursuit of excellence in book design. Independently, we will each take on freelance work on a case by case basis. As for The Frontispiece, it will be on a indefinite hiatus, though there is a chance I may revive it as a fine book publisher (in hindsight, perhaps what it always should have been) at some point in the future.
Mary Anne Franks’s The Cult of the Constitution (Stanford, 2018)
We are eternally grateful to our clients and our supporters over the years. If you are interested in working with us individually, follow the links and email addresses below.
Kevin Barrett Kane
Kevin is a book designer and compositor at Stanford University Press. He is a student at the 2020 Type West Postgraduate Type Design Program at Letterform Archive in San Francisco, California.
Emma Christine Hall
Emma is an art director at Callisto Media where she designs book covers and interiors, directs photography and illustration programs, and establishes design systems for non-fiction books and series.