Book_Art_Blog — Visual Culture

In his 2007 essay, ‘Collapsing Bulkheads’, design critic Rick Poynor argues that in terms of book cover design, JG Ballard’s darkly dystopian 1973 novel, Crash, ‘has been peculiarly resistant to attempts to summarise it with a single image’. For him, the efforts of successive designers and illustrators down the years, such as Chris Foss, James Marsh, Carin Goldberg and others, have failed to fully encapsulate the true ‘delirium’ of the author’s ‘psychopathic hymn’ to the erotic potential of the automobile accident. Instead, Poynor points to Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden’s montage approach for the cover of the 1994 Noonday...