Q. Why are windows bad at lying?
A. Because you can see right through them.
A. Because you can see right through them.
Windows are very popular. Most people love to stare through them. I mean, from inside their houses, like out at a lovely sunset. If most people loved to stare through a window *from the outside*, like into a person's living room, well that sounds like it would be a serious problem. Hopefully that isn't happening. However it does lead in to the subject I'll be discussing.
I get the feeling windows can be a good signifier of...quite a lot really; of voyeurism, of insiders and outsiders. Homes - like walls - can keep people in and keep people out, and that pane of glass carved into a wall can give us a glimpse into the hidden little worlds lined up along each street. They can be a live reality tv show, for curtain twitchers to peer through at mysterious figures passing by. I was thinking about all these ideas when I was working on the book cover design for a new edition of This Sweet Sickness, by Patricia Highsmith, for the Virago Modern Classics series.
I get the feeling windows can be a good signifier of...quite a lot really; of voyeurism, of insiders and outsiders. Homes - like walls - can keep people in and keep people out, and that pane of glass carved into a wall can give us a glimpse into the hidden little worlds lined up along each street. They can be a live reality tv show, for curtain twitchers to peer through at mysterious figures passing by. I was thinking about all these ideas when I was working on the book cover design for a new edition of This Sweet Sickness, by Patricia Highsmith, for the Virago Modern Classics series.
I happen to be a huge fan of Patricia Highsmith. As a personal project I had designed a cover for her much more famous work, 'The Talented Mr Ripley'.
Highsmith had a fascinating ability to get into the minds of (very) antisocial and delusional men, and to successfully pull readers into those minds with her. In This Sweet Sickness, the man is David Kelsey and his obsession is Annabelle, who he was dating once upon a time. She's moved on and he definitely has not. In fact, he creates a story in his mind that they are in love and soon to be married, and this fantasy becomes more complex until his sanity begins to crack.
I thought about the Manhattan apartment building he lives alone in, which eventually becomes like a cage. While researching this blog I found an older edition of the novel, which also used the anonymity of the windows of an Apartment building shrouded by his shadow.
My early sketches show a woman under the spotlight from a window, like a searchlight. I thought of the terror of always being watched, and the violence that could at any moment spill out from this surveillance.
The book was published in 1960. The cult British horror movie Peeping Tom, a deeply disturbing film about a serial killer who records his crimes on camera, hit cinemas in the same year. Like This Sweet Sickness, the film creates a sense of complicity in the viewer.
By identifying with the protagonist - the watcher, are we losing our empathy for the women he watches?
By identifying with the protagonist - the watcher, are we losing our empathy for the women he watches?
I played with many ideas, and kept coming back to the human eye. Eyes are sometimes called 'the window to the soul'. I also thought of the Neitzsche quote that "if you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
My art director, Nico Taylor, made the brilliant suggestion that the woman should be positioned just outside of that beam of light. He's staring but he can't really see her. All he can see is the fantasy he's created in his own mind. The real human being is long gone.
What I love about Highsmith is that she interrogates our own ideas of ourselves. She asks if we ourselves are as immune from delusion as we might assume. She tempts us into looking closer. Isn't this also the aim of graphic design?
