By way of a press release, the studio distributed a nude, count-the-genitals photograph of its team. Under the direction of partners Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh, the studio’s new promotional materials include branded condoms, erection-measuring pencils, and CDs stamped with stick-figure women performing fellatio. So it seemed like a major step back this week when the influential, newly relaunched design studio Sagmeister & Walsh, who have designed a number of books themselves, unveiled a new identity system whose sexual politics could be said to be troubling at best. And as Michael Bierut once noted on Design Observer, many of our most successful female designers - Louise Fili, Carin Goldberg, Barbara deWilde, and Paula Scher - came to prominence as book designers. In the US, although women in book design surely still face challenges (including an assumption I’ve encountered, on the part of some publishers, that women are best suited to designing sensitive literary fiction and chick-lit, not to mention the more blatant cases of sexual harassment I’ve heard about firsthand) they do hold positions of power in art departments at a number of publishers and imprints, including Knopf, Vintage, Crown, Riverhead, and Hachette. (Dean had a moment of celebrity when Julian Barnes, in his Booker acceptance speech for The Sense of an Ending, called her “the best book designer in town.”) That partnership ended around 2002, and today things seem to be looking brighter for women in British design, with Donna Payne leading Faber’s art department and Suzanne Dean running the show at Random House UK. Despite having a design degree and distinguished resume, she was no longer able to work as a designer.įor her part, Shirley Tucker succeeded her predecessor Berthold Wolpe as art director of Faber and Faber upon his retirement in 1975, but was forced out herself when Faber handed creative control over to a team at Pentagram led by John McConnell in 1980.
for less money to justify our position.” Soon after landing in the art department at The Sun, she became pregnant, was forced to leave, and, as she puts it, was “relegated to the scrap heap.” As a mother, she would no longer be considered even for freelance work because employers thought she couldn’t be depended upon. Throughout her short career, she says, “we just had to work harder. In a segment that aired on Radio 4′s iPMlast weekend, another designer, Jacqueline Redmond, recounts her experiences working in the British tabloid publishing industry in the 1960s to interviewer Eddie Mair. “One felt one related to her and her problems and her life and what happened,” she says, and although she declines to elaborate, it’s not hard to imagine that Tucker, as a woman with career ambitions in the 1960s, experienced many of the same pressures and difficulties Plath’s narrator describes, even in such a creative field as graphic design. Despite marking the fiftieth anniversary of The Bell Jar‘s original publication with what can only be described charitably as an unfortunate new cover, Faber and Faber recently released a video interview with Tucker about the creative process behind designing a book that was among the most important to chronicle the challenges faced by women in the postwar era.
Her cover for the first edition of The Bell Jar to be published under Sylvia Plath’s name is a monument of restraint, the concentric circles depicting the protagonist Esther Greenwood’s descent into despair while evoking, subtly, the book’s title. In 1966, a young designer at Faber and Faber named Shirley Tucker created an image that would become an icon of modern design.
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