Judging books by their covers,
October 2003.

Lies and the Lying Liars
Who Tell Them
Al Franken
Jacket design: Richard Hasselberger
Photo of Al Franken: Jan Cobb
E. P. Dutton

Dude, Where’s My Country?
Michael Moore
Photo of Michael Moore,
   illustration and design: P.R. Brown
Photos of tanks, Capitol, soldiers: Corbis
Photo of George W. Bush: Getty Images
Warner Books

Who’s Looking Out for You?
Bill O’Reilly
Jacket design: John Fontana
Cover photograph: Deborah Feingold
Broadway Books

I’d like to say something nice about these three covers, and here it is: it’s kind of refreshing when a designer uses only one typeface. Did each designer use his typeface well? That’s another matter.

First of all, it’s fantastic that Al Franken’s book even made it to the stands, as Fox News had sued Franken over the “fair and balanced” portion of the subtitle of the book. Fortunately, Franken won, and mightily, too: the court suggested that Fox could well lose its trademark status for that phrase.

But that’s about as much as I can say for this cover. It tries too hard to be clever, and in fact its central statement, that conservatives like Ann Coulter, George W. Bush, Bill O’Reilly and Dick Cheney are chronic liars, is relegated to the background. It, like the two other covers under review here, falls prey to the unspoken maxim that political-opinion books have to have a photo of the author on the cover. How much better this cover would have been if the television screens were front and center. Instead, here we have Franken, who likes to pose himself satirically as an authority figure (one previous cover has him in a study with books behind him, like a personal-injury lawyer; another has him being inaugurated as president), as the television pundit who will expose these liars.

Then there’s Michael Moore, pariah of the left. Of the three books here, this one is clearly the best-looking. The designer must have had a field day, not to mention a sizable budget: it ain’t cheap to buy one Corbis stock-photo image, let alone three Corbis images plus a Getty image, folks.

And the imagery is all pretty typical ham-handedness from Michael Moore: a banner across the Capitol reading “LEAVE NO BILLIONAIRE BEHIND,” Moore personally bringing down a statue of George W. Bush in the likeness of Saddam Hussein. It’s all very well-executed, but that title is nagging me: if Moore is going to satirize the title of a film, namely Dude, Where’s My Car? shouldn’t the rest of the book cover follow suit?

At the very least, it could have picked up the typography of the film title, but then, that wouldn’t have gone well with this cover image.

And on the subject of typography, there’s something really bothersome about the text on Moore’s cover, similar but less so on Franken’s: outlining. Something that instantly characterizes someone as a bad design client is when the client wants everything to “pop” more. These clients don’t understand that if everything pops, then nothing does. Moore’s type certainly pops, but at a cost to good typography.

Here’s a good rule to know about design: just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. In this case, simply that one has the ability in design software to put an outline around letters doesn’t mean you should do it. The problem is that if you increase the size of the outline (called a stroke) around a letter, you will end up undermining the shape of that letter for the sake of emphasis. All subtlety and nuance, not to mention the craft of type design, has been sacrificed. A better method is to stroke only the outside of the letter so that the letter itself remains the shape it was meant to be.

In the example to the right, the three sets of letters are all exactly the same point size. The top set is unstroked so you can see the pure shapes of the letters. The middle set is stroked three points in the middle, so it extends both into the characters and outside them. The bottom set is stroked three points to the outside. You can clearly see that the proportions of the letters in the middle set have been thrown off, and that’s pretty much what happened on Moore’s cover. The stroke on Franken’s cover is much smaller, so the letter shapes aren’t obscured as much.

In Moore’s case, the large center stroke strongly indicates that he’s willing to obscure subtleties in the name of making a bold statement. Sure, the letters may pop, but so do balloons.

Truthfully, I really only included Bill O’Reilly’s book here because I wanted to be fair and balanced with my critiques. I can’t say enough bad things about this cover. It’s another case where the client apparently wanted the type to pop, and instead of going for the stroke, the designer went for the fake drop shadow. Lordy. If you have the budget, make a real damn shadow.

The type itself, besides being a jumble of alignments, is way too large; it makes O’Reilly look like he has a peanut head. And the way he looks — oy vey. With Franken and Moore, at least you can say that Franken has a face that makes you want to chuckle with him, at least a little, and Moore has a certain boyish charm that always seems to say, I can’t believe I’m still getting away with this shit. But O’Reilly looks smug and self-satisfied, neither pretty traits. And it sure looks like he could have used an iron. Apparently no one’s looking out for Bill O’Reilly. That’s fine by me, actually.

Judgment: We are vain and we are blind/I hate people when they’re not polite.