PresleyStandingUp

I recently had the privilege of creating a cover for Dr. Sharon Presley’s new book Standing Up to Experts and Authorities (The Solomon Press). Presley received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the City University of New York Graduate Center where her mentor was Stanley Milgram. (Milgram who created the classic experiment which shows that a large percentage of the population will administer potentially lethal doses of electrical current to a test subject if an authority figure orders them to do so.)

For the overall cover design, the author asked for the typeface employed in the original The Prisioner TV series (created by Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein). This typeface is basically Albertus with the lower case “e” right loop cut away and the dots left off the lower case “i”.

For the back cover I employed a condensed sans typeface since there was a lot of information to pack into the small area, and also because Albertus doesn’t lend itself to easy reading at a smaller size. Finally I created a vector version of the Solomon Press logo to help avoid having a “fuzzy” look to it. A black background gave the cover a somewhat ominous feel, yet also permits a very rich looking cover as well.

One challenges was creating archetypical “authority figures” which reflected the diversity of the various “little tyrants” one might encounter these days. I finally settled on three figures for the illustration, one representing science/medicine, the second a businessman/politician, and the third a “man in uniform” – in this case, a policeman. (We had originally thought about an abstract lone figure standing in a crowd that was seated, but this proved too nebulous and never even got to the rough sketch point in the project.)

The other challenge was creating expressions on the characters that projected a feeling of disdain and/or superiority. Obviously an artist needs to know a lot about micro-expressions and body language to convey such emotions. (Interestingly enough, while many people can’t read such facial expressions on a conscious level, they do perceive the messages on the subconscious, causing them to feel uneasy or have “intuitive” feelings about those displaying these small facial expressions.) Capturing such facial expressions in artwork can thus deliver a somewhat disquieting message to those who don’t directly read facial expressions. Hopefully this cover achieves that.

After finishing this cover, I realized that those in authority often have “costumes” or uniforms that make them distinctive from the general population: Expensive suits, white lab coats, flag pins or ties, or even actual uniforms. Each bit adds a little bit of intimidation.

So can there be an authority figure in a nudist colony? Sadly, I expect the answer is “yes.”

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Duncan Long has a wide range of clients he does cover artwork for including HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, American Media, Fort Ross, Asimov’s, Solomon Press, and many other publishers. See more of his book illustrations at DuncanLong.com.