David Drummond, of Salamander Hill Design based in Elgin, PQ, is one of University of Manitoba Press’ freelance graphic designers. Most recently, he’s designed the covers for Mark Anderson and Carmen Robertson’s Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers.
For spring 2012, David was responsible for the covers of Larry Krotz’s Piecing the Puzzle: The Genesis of AIDS Research in Africa and UMP’s reprint of Jennifer Reid’s Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State.
David was kind enough to share a bit about his design process around the Louis Riel cover:
“My goal with recent covers that I have been working on that deal with Canadian history is to up the ante and really make them look visually interesting. The covers I did recently for a two volume series on Darcy McGee are a case in point. We used high end production techniques to give them the aura of an ‘important book.’”
“In the case of the Riel cover I wanted to avoid presenting archival photos in the usual fashion – duotones and sepiatones. I manipulated the archival image in Photoshop to give it an illustrative feel with lots of colour. This is not the typical way that figures from Canadian history are presented.”
