Warren Ellis’ Normal and the Art of Animated Book Covers

This year, publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux launched an unusual publishing experiment with writer Warren Ellis. Taking a page from his work in comics, Ellis penned a serialized novel in four parts (each currently on sale for $.99 on Nook), to be released over the course of a month this summer, with a collected edition planned for November.
Written as four separate works that fit seamlessly together, it follows Adam Dearden, a patient at Normal Head, an unplugged retreat for a digitally oppressive, environmentally faltering near-future world. A fellow pateint’s inexplicable disappearance sends Adam down a rabbit hole of discovery that will redefine his very perceptions of reality.
To celebrate the less-than-normal road to publication, FSG decided to do something unique for the covers as well, designing a type treatment that carries across all four volumes, literally piecing itself together as the clues to the mystery fall into place—images that assemble into an animated cover for the collected edition.

We recently got a chance to ask a few questions of the artist behind the covers, Charlotte Strick, a book designer for FSG for 14 years, and now a principal at the Brooklyn-based design firm Strick&Williams, who told us what goes in to creating the next generation of digital covers. (You may recognize her work on the animated covers of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, which you can see below.)

How did you get involved in this project?
I was the art director of the paperback division at Farrar, Straus and Giroux when this novel was first launched in-house back in 2014. Normal was then still in the process of being written, but there was an outline for me to work from, and I needed to design the covers with the reading material that I had.
What was your working relationship with Warren Ellis?
I never communicated directly with Warren Ellis. His editor, Sean McDonald, acted as our go-between.
What challenges were posed by designing 4 covers that work in a sequence?
Despite its title, the publishing plan for Normal is non-traditional, so an equally unexpected design approach was called for. We produced an animation of the cover and then extracted four ‘film stills’ to be used as the covers for the separate installments of the eBook release; these are all available to readers now. A single volume print edition will at last be available this November—reversing the natural publishing order of things.
The work of photographer, Todd McLellan, was a great inspiration to me for this project. McLellan takes machinery apart—every last bolt, nut, screw, and chip and then he photographs these in precise, explosive detail and with a strange sort of grace—as though each scrap were taking flight.
I worked with the talented illustrator/designer, Pedro Almeida, to make a less pristine, primarily black and white and eerie underground world for Normal. Almeida’s animation shows the 3D title being blown to smithereens—first with the letterforms at their most fragmented and then having the letters piece themselves back together in reverse, bit by tiny bit, frame by frame, until they look disturbingly more normal (and whole) by eBook #4. One of our primary goals was to ensure that each of the four phases of type-destruction was distinct, so that the reader would easily witness this evolution. I nagged Almeida to give us masses of tiny, splintered pieces, punctuated with hints of brass and gold, to rain down over the covers. Creating a mesmerizing metal rainstorm, that we hope you won’t soon forget.
    
Do you think all ebook covers will ultimately be animated? Would that have been your ideal vision here?
We animated the cover illustrations for Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, and they were well received online. With Normal we pushed the idea of an animated cover even further, combining elements of both illustration and photography, and considering the moving cover(s) before the still one. It was pretty thrilling to see the type come to life from Almeida’s flat sketches. If readers continue to embrace [ebooks], I expect reading devices will evolve to be able to handle animated cover art—making our job as jacket designers even richer and more challenging. Though I can’t (and won’t!) imagine the total end of print. Humans crave the tactile.
Preorder the collected edition of Normal, publishing November 29.