‘Restraint, clarity, respect for the story’: Devangana Dash’s philosophy for designing book covers
Devangana Dash is a book designer, art director and educator, and the most recent winner of the Oxford Bookstore Book Cover Prize. She won the prize for designing Conversations with Aurangzeb, written by Charu Nivedita and translated from the Tamil by Nandini Krishnan.
In addition to designing books, she is also an illustrator and author of a children’s picture book called The Jungle Radio: Birdsongs of India. Her art and stories mostly use visual autoethnography, and find roots in community, conservation, education, childhood and mental health. For inspiration, she relies on children’s picture books, folk art, Urdu poetry, synchronicity of life events, art therapy, the ocean, and her two cats. She spoke to Scroll about her long years of designing and her aesthetics. Excerpts from the interview:
In a conversation with Scroll, Dash talked about her book-designing philosophy, the design sins she’ll never commit, creating covers for perennially bestselling authors like George Orwell and Kahlil Gibran, and how artificial intelligence can enrich a designer’s work with “intention and care”. Excerprs from the conversation:
How did you start designing book covers? Do you remember the first time you thought that you could live happily doing this? Is there a cover you are especially proud of?
My journey into book design began at home, where...
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