Book Jacket Designs by Kristen Hewitt
Judge a Book by Its Cover - Featuring Designs by Kristen Hewitt
Bio:
Kristen Hewitt is a Design Director at Chronicle Books in San Francisco. She has worked at Chronicle Books since 2004, and currently designs books and gift product for the Art Publishing Group. Over the past 14 years, she has the good fortune to work with an amazing roster of talented authors and artists. Past projects have included Whatever You Are Be a Good One by Lisa Congdon, Well-Read Women by Samantha Hahn, a large stationery and gift program with Marimekko, and ancillary product to Congressman John Lewis’s award-winning MARCH trilogy, in addition to many others. When asked about working at Chronicle Books, Kristen often muses "I have to pinch myself when I think about who I’ve had the good fortune to work with”.
Inspiration for Broad Strokes by Bridget Quinn:
Historically, major women artists have been excluded from the mainstream art canon—Broad Strokes by art historian Bridget Quinn, offers a corrective to that omission. The book delves into the fascinating lives and careers of 15 female artists who made art and made history (in that order). When the manuscript from Bridget came in, I was blown away not only by her refreshingly candid and humorous writing style, but also at the lives these women lived. Because we had such a wide variety of artists in the book, through time and medium, when I began to think about the cover design, I knew that I didn’t want to highlight just one or a few artists on the cover—it needed to be all of them, or none of them. The common thread that ties all of the 15 artists together was the passion they all had to create. It was moving and inspiring. Their messy, dramatic, and raw lives had this emotional energy that really influenced the idea of the cover. I wanted to create something myself that spoke to the boldness and passion that they all had inside them. I tried a couple of different color palettes when painting the brushstroke background, but the vibrancy of the pinks and reds won out in the end, they really seemed to capture the energy of these women in a perfect way. For the book title treatment, I chose a bold, sans serif type treatment because I wanted to shout to the passerby, “Hey! These women shall no longer be ignored!”.