Lucas Heinrich is a graphic design artist who primarily designs book covers for companies like Penguin Random House. He has an intuitive eye for design and has worked on some very notable titles in recent years. Lucas has provided art direction, cover design, bookmark graphic design, and gold foil design for Gallowglass Books, so we asked him to grace us with an interview.
How did you get into graphic design and specifically book design?
After years as a marketing designer, I enrolled in classes at an advertising school, hoping to move into copywriting or art direction. A teacher there gave a presentation on her book cover design work and it clicked almost instantly that that is what I really would rather be doing! I built a portfolio of self-assigned book covers, moved to New York where all the publishing jobs are, and have been lucky enough to make a living with it ever since.
Was there an experience growing up where you realized you had a passion for design?
As a kid I think it came out as an interest in how things looked. Logos, sports team uniforms, magazines—I liked creating my own versions, even if I didn't really have a concept of "design" as a field.
Are there any designers or artists you look up to or admire?
The best part of my job today is I often get to commission or license art from talented artists. Recently I discovered an amazing marbling artist, Sheryl Oppenheim, whose work was perfect for a book on journaling we just published. I was lucky to be able to work on a project last year with my wife, Nana An, who is an illustrator of many things, including book covers. She did both the hardcover and the very different paperback illustrations for Téa Obreht's latest novel, and it was inspiring to see both projects come together. Lastly, I would mention Jenny Volvovski, who was the teacher I mentioned in the first question and a designer with an amazing portfolio of both real book cover assignments and unsolicited redesigns for books she has read. Inspiring!
Do you have a favorite book illustrator?
When first learning to read "chapter books," those little black and white interior illustrations throughout children's novels really do influence how I remember the book. The inky, fun Quentin Blake illustrations in Roald Dahl's books still stick in my mind.
Do you have an all-time favorite book cover design? Could be your own or someone else’s.
No favorites that I would be brave enough to build a list of, but I will always be a sucker for a series design. John Gall's Murakami paperbacks, Peter Mendelsund's redesigns for W.G. Sebald. Both are designers who make great use of collage, in both cases here for authors where it feels like a perfect match to the content.
Are there any principles that you follow when designing, or is it all intuitive?
I think I've absorbed a long list of principles that I can sort of articulate when I have to art direct someone else! But it basically does come down to looking at something and feeling that it does or does not "feel right" and then working backward from there.
How do you navigate the relationship between content and cover?
We get a lot of notes at the start from the editor and author. I almost never start a project flying blind, I have a general idea of what the whole team thinks the cover needs to accomplish. But the truth is that an author doesn't really know what they want until they have seen actual designs. That's the heart of the job, being able to interpret requests with the experience to imagine what might work better. Ultimately, the core idea will be whatever the author says it is, and you have to respect that. But another part of that respect is making a real effort to understand it on your own and give your best toward representing it in an interesting way.
What are some of your favorite books?
Oof, a tough one.
Long book category: The Magic Mountain, The Power Broker, Middlemarch, Mortals by Norman Rush.
Sci-fi authors with a K in their name: Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick
Are there any eras of graphic design that you take inspiration from?
I took a design history course that really emphasized borrowing layout and design thinking from eras of design. The Russian avant-garde stuff like Rodchenko and El Lissitzky is cool on its own merits, but really studying how they placed elements in unexpected ways, how they unbalanced their designs to make them so dynamic opened my eyes to a lot of possibilities.
What does the future of book design look like with the rise of artificial intelligence and the corporate focus on profit over design?
I don't know, really. I can game out the worst outcomes easily enough, but if I wanted to give the optimistic pitch it would be that the job of a book cover designer is maybe 30% being able to create something that looks nice. Solving a design challenge rarely operates like an AI input, where we arrive at an image that was already perfectly formed in the author's mind via trial and error.
Authors who sign on to a publisher usually care a lot about what the cover looks like and want to know that there is a team of people really thinking about it, engaging with it, and responding to their feedback along the way. Experienced editors have developed just as discerning an eye for cover design as the art department, and they know what is cliche and what is fresh and unexpected.
I've seen up close at a previous job, well before the AI hype, how streamlining a design department's costs through outsourcing, systematizing, overworking, etc., does nothing to help a publisher and seemed to only speed up everything else falling apart. Am I saying that cover art is the cog that holds all of publishing together? Yes, yes I am.
Have you done any traveling that influenced your design afterwards?
I enjoy visiting book stores in foreign countries, there really is a different "book cover" aesthetic in different markets. Spending time in Korea, I really appreciate the clean, tasteful approach you see across the covers in stores there. In the US market, we have to go bigger and bigger with the title type most of the time—"can we read this at Amazon thumbnail size?!"—but that didn't seem to be such a major consideration there.
Do you have any ghost, UFO, bigfoot, or other strange stories to share?
One of my best friends is a sasquatch enthusiast who had us go on a "bigfoot hunt" for his bachelor party. What did we find in the woods that night? Well, we all swore an oath to never tell another soul.