Danzón. Diálogos de música y baile por la cuenca del Caribe.
Alejandro L. Madrid & Robin D. Moore
(Editorial Universidad de Nuevo León - Monterrey, México)
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Book cover design
Alejandro L. Madrid & Robin D. Moore
(Editorial Universidad de Nuevo León - Monterrey, México)
-
Book cover design
Danzón. Diálogos de música y baile por la cuenca del Caribe is an academic study on the origins of Danzón music and dance by my friend musicologist and author, Alejandro L Madrid and author Robin D. Moore. I was asked to create a cover after the original design had to be pulled because of an issue with usage rights for the photograph that had been selected.
The challenge was to create a photographic cover that accurately represented the subject matter without recurring to generic "Latin dance" stock photography, and not having images from the book with enough resolution and quality to work with. Alejandro supplied me with a couple of images we had permission to use. The most striking one was a film still from a movie by Mexican director Emilio Fernández, depicting a danzón dance contest. I rescaled it to a size I could work with, but the aspect ratio was not right, so I wound up with half the cover area empty. I didn't want to use a flat color field or a pattern to resolve the remaining space, as that had been used on the original design. The books' subtitle ("Dialogs on music and dance in the Caribbean basin") provided the design solution.
As was the case with much of Latin dancehall music from the first half of the 20th Century, lyrical content often mixed ideals of romantic love with landscape and Danzón music was no different. Lyrics often referenced idyllic sandy beaches, sunsets and warm summer breezes, reflecting the style's Caribbean origin. With this in mind, I dug through an envelope I have of postcards that my father had collected in his youth as a traveling salesman in 1940's México. I hit the jackpot when I found this perfect (copyright free) image of a sunset with a swaying palm tree in Veracruz, one of the places where Danzón culture made landfall in México. The clients loved the combination of images and I was really happy to be able to add a personal touch to the design, as my parents were huge fans of Danzón music, which they would dance until late at night on Friday nights when my dad come home from work.
I applied duotones to the original black and white images in InDesign to add visual impact, but toned them colorfully to convey a sense of dreamy, rose tinted nostalgia and hazy memories of dancing in the tropical heat. For the title, I used a font called Bourton with a dotted inline variant that evokes period nightclub signs.
The challenge was to create a photographic cover that accurately represented the subject matter without recurring to generic "Latin dance" stock photography, and not having images from the book with enough resolution and quality to work with. Alejandro supplied me with a couple of images we had permission to use. The most striking one was a film still from a movie by Mexican director Emilio Fernández, depicting a danzón dance contest. I rescaled it to a size I could work with, but the aspect ratio was not right, so I wound up with half the cover area empty. I didn't want to use a flat color field or a pattern to resolve the remaining space, as that had been used on the original design. The books' subtitle ("Dialogs on music and dance in the Caribbean basin") provided the design solution.
As was the case with much of Latin dancehall music from the first half of the 20th Century, lyrical content often mixed ideals of romantic love with landscape and Danzón music was no different. Lyrics often referenced idyllic sandy beaches, sunsets and warm summer breezes, reflecting the style's Caribbean origin. With this in mind, I dug through an envelope I have of postcards that my father had collected in his youth as a traveling salesman in 1940's México. I hit the jackpot when I found this perfect (copyright free) image of a sunset with a swaying palm tree in Veracruz, one of the places where Danzón culture made landfall in México. The clients loved the combination of images and I was really happy to be able to add a personal touch to the design, as my parents were huge fans of Danzón music, which they would dance until late at night on Friday nights when my dad come home from work.
I applied duotones to the original black and white images in InDesign to add visual impact, but toned them colorfully to convey a sense of dreamy, rose tinted nostalgia and hazy memories of dancing in the tropical heat. For the title, I used a font called Bourton with a dotted inline variant that evokes period nightclub signs.
