The Poems of Cold Mountain

I chose to redesign the cover of a collection of poems written twelve thousand years ago by the Chinese poet Han Shan — “Cold Mountain” in English.

This work is a beautiful, award-winning translation of poems that had been written on rocks and trees and cliffs by a reclusive poet in the T’ang Dynasty, an era which saw culture flourishing in China. I am aware of nothing quite like these poems in Western culture from anywhere near that time — and even today, it is rare to find anything that compares to these works in their embrace of raw nature and inner enlightenment.

Consulting with my peers in this course, I chose two images for my cover redesign: a photograph I took while climbing on the southern edge of the Stein Valley watershed in British Columbia, Canada; and a traditional piece of Chinese artwork from the Museum of Natural History in New York.

These images work well together because they both allude to the name of the poet — Cold Mountain. In addition, the Chinese artwork situates the poet within his culture while tying the cover photograph in to that context a little more closely. To further accentuate this tie, I applied a partial sepia toning effect to both images, and adjusted the contrast and brightness of both to let the cover image stand out a bit from the back cover. Further to that aim, I applied a canvas texture to the back cover image.

For the text, I chose a typeface called Azuki OT. This is a brush stroke font, and it varies the nature of the stroke slightly for each character (depending upon which characters are found beside). I felt that this typeface captured well the sense of an ancient Chinese poet’s work, which would have been done in brushwork. I retained the spot color for the publishing company’s logo, and I utilized that color in an “Outer Glow” effect around the title on the cover, set at 12% to blend with the clouds. It should be possible to just use one spot color to print this cover (if tinted paper is also used), greatly reducing the cost for the print job.

To set the publisher’s logo seamlessly onto the cover, I used the “Blend IF” option on the layers that held the logo; and, I filled the spine with a background tint sampled from the cover photo.

The original designer of the book’s cover was Valerie Brewster. That cover is very nice and well designed, but, I feel that the design was forced to fit the photograph used for that cover. Also, the choice of the image seems to be weighted more to the translator (who did an excellent job, by the way — much better than others have done in the past) in showing a pine tree (the translator identifies himself as “Red Pine”).

The back cover of the original is similarly problematic in that it uses reverse text (white — and red — on a black background), which is a choice I trend to avoid since it can cause legibility issues when the background ink seeps into the text. This can be avoided, of course, by using premium quality papers; but, that incurs an added cost in printing — money better spent on better quality paper for the text inside.