Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

printing manuals and saved even just a few letters from old books or
posters if they caught her eye.
When it came time to design, Fili drew tissue after tissue until
just the right letterforms evolved to capture the particular mood or
emotional tone of the book. Then, she hunted for a typesetter who carried
the typeface. “Usually no one did, so I had to start from scratch and rebuild
it, letter by letter, for my needs,” Fili told illustrator Dugald Stermer in an
article in Communication Artsmagazine (September/October 1986 ). With
the typeface reconstructed or redesigned, she then hired a professional to
render the new letterforms (this was before Fontographer). Occasionally, as
was the case with The Lover, the title and author’s name were rendered
exactly as they would appear on the jacket, complete with any special
effects like the shadow. She has altered the stress, weight, slant, or width of
typefaces to achieve an unusual effect. Her combinations of letterforms and
juxtapositions of type styles within a single composition were rarely safe,
but the unexpected combinations resulted in work that while respectful of a
book’s content nevertheless projected a highly intuitive, expressive style.
Considered tame by today’s standards, which, thanks to the
computer, present custom typography and unexpected visual juxtapositions
as the norm, Fili’s jackets and covers nevertheless opened the door for
further innovation. In the late 1980 s art director Carol Carson and
designers Barbara de Wilde and Chip Kidd for Alfred A. Knopf, and, later,
Michael Ian Kaye for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in particular have expanded
the ways books present themselves in the marketplace. Unusual materials
and textures have transformed books into intimate objects. Imagery made
of visual fragments, quirky typography, and aggressive compositions have
pushed the limits of conceptual interpretation, occasionally providing only
tangential clues to the content of the book. Over the eleven years she was
at Pantheon, Fili’s precisionist covers, with their typographic sensitivity and
conceptual illustration, moved beyond mimicking content.