Who Designed It? ‘Intermezzo’ by Sally Rooney
Cover Design by June Park
Title: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Cover Designer: June Park
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG)
Publication Date: September 24, 2024
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney was published on September 24, 2024. If you didn’t know this, you may be living under a rock. But hey, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Rocks are nice.
What you might not know is who designed the book’s (American) cover. Today, I’d like to introduce you to the work of June Park.
June Park is a New York-based graphic designer and illustrator. She has worked in-house at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) since 2018. While writing this newsletter, I learned she just became an art director at Little, Brown, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Park, on the Intermezzo cover:
“There's a lot of discourse online — a lot of hype about the cover, about the book, of course, a lot of debate between which cover you like more: U.K. vs. U.S. It’s really all fun and makes me very happy to hear the discussion continue.”
—June Park
Other Covers by June Park
Here are some other excellent book covers from June Park.
The Upstairs Delicatessen by Dwight Garner (FSG, 2023)
Truly Like Lightning by David Duchovny (FSG, 2021)
The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America by Eric Cervini (FSG, 2020)
Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch (FSG, 2021)
Turtles All the Way Down by John Green (Dutton, 2017)
Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral; Lettering by June Park
Valerie or, The Faculty of Dreams: A Novel by Sara Stridsberg; Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner (FSG, 2019)
Couplets by Maggie Millner (FSG, 2024)
Toad by Katherine Dunn (Picador, 2023)
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades (Random House, 2022)
Other Work by June Park
Links
June Park’s Panolo Blahnik Instagram, where she and fellow designer Na Kim made shoes out of bread.
Here’s How the Cover of Fall’s Biggest Book—Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo—Came to Life (People Magazine)
June Park on Designing Katherine Dunn’s Toad (Spine Magazine)
June Park’s page on I Need A Book Cover, a directory to hire book designers
Bonus: UK Cover
Perhaps more than usual in the States, the UK cover for Intermezzo is also getting a good amount of attention (and for good reason). This cover was designed by Kishan Rajani.
Here’s an article from British GQ digging in to the cover design process. It’s a good read, despite it opening with the line “don’t judge a book by its cover.” They must not have gotten my memo.
What to you think? Which cover do you prefer, and why?
Thanks for reading! Depending on the response, I may turn this into a regular feature. I like shining a light on the designers behind well-known books and showcasing more of their work.
Colophon
A Book Designer’s Notebook is a newsletter about book design and creative practice from the desk of Nathaniel Roy.
It uses the typefaces Merriweather, Futura, and whatever fonts Substack has chosen. Merriweather is a Google font designed to be a text face that is pleasant to read on screens. Futura is geometric sans-serif designed by Paul Renner in 1927. It is on the moon.
Nathaniel Roy is a book designer, collage maker, photo taker, self publisher, and a few other things in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
You can see his work and hire him here. If you want to support this newsletter, you can buy him a coffee here.
Incredible body of work here! Had no idea she did the Turtles All teh Way Down book cover! One of my favorites!
Both covers are terrible. Amateurish. Stock-art-ish. Was shocked when I saw the US one. Rooney deserves better.