Hasta La Ideas

Vintage has redesigned its Haruki Murakami backlist and commissioned illustrator Noma Bar to recover each of the Japanese author’s books…

Writing on the Vintage Books Design tumblr, Random House creative director Suzanne Dean says the use of the central circle device, along with a colour palette of red, black and off-white create a consistent identity for the set of 15 books.

“Murakami’s work has a sense that something has been lost or hidden, what is real and what is not,” she says. “To match this playfulness for the covers, we commissioned Noma Bar [whose] powerful graphic illustrations cleverly utilise negative space concealing secondary images and illusions. Noma’s illustrations were screenprinted by hand to give them a personal and softer edge.”

“As with Murakami’s writing,” adds Bar, “new meanings can be found in my illustrations on closer inspection and these discoveries reveal themselves in layers, like a puzzle. These layers of discovery are evident in all of my work.”

The full set of 15 Murakami titles can be seen at vintagebooksdesign.tumblr.com (13 of the covers are by Bar). See vintage-books.co.uk. Noma Bar is represented by Dutch Uncle.

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