The Joy of Sweat by Sarah Everts (Norton)
A stunningly evocative book jacket, given that there’s only type – exclusively set in caps from a single font – plus a number of rounded shapes with gradients and shades. The design by Renald Louissaint (with art direction by Sarahmay Wilkinson) is hot, wet, and joyful, and thus perfectly captures the topic of Sarah Everts’ book, The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration.
Alison Forner agrees. She nominated the design for Literary Hub’s “The 101 Best Book Covers of 2021” and comments:
What can I say about this, except that I want to reach out and touch it! I haven’t seen the book in person, but I sincerely hope some cash was spent to emboss and spot gloss those sweat drops. Between the blocky black type that interacts with the sweat, the orange gradient, and the small scientific element that punctuates the subtitle, the design decisions here are incredibly complex, but the result is effortless.
The typeface is MD Nichrome, a display sans drawn by Rutherford Craze. First released via Future Fonts in April 2020, it was completed in August 2021. Nichrome references “the typography of paperback science fiction from the ’70s and early ’80s. Many of the typefaces from this time and genre, originally drawn for dry transfer and photo-lettering, were never digitized as carefully as they deserved – Nichrome seeks to remedy this for current technology and style, not by reviving any single typeface, but by capturing elements of many.” Mission accomplished: Nichrome feels eerily familiar and refreshingly uncharted at the same time.
