Say Hello to Metamodernism!
Book Cover Illustration, Typography, Layout ~ ProCreate, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign
This is Metamodernism
Greg Dember, the author of Say Hello to Metamodernism! Understanding Today’s Culture of Empathic Reflexivity, Ironesty, and Felt Experience, has written a tremendous book insightful to the zeitgeist—we’re no longer in Postmodern times, we’re in a Metamodern era.
Illustration Inspiration
The main sources of visual and illustration inspiration were BoJack Horseman, New Yorker cover illustrations by Luci Gutiérrez and The French Dispatch illustrations, the New Yorker-esque publication from the titular Wes Anderson film.
My Role as Illustrator
Working together, he was instructive in teaching me about metamodernism and the intricacies of its definition. Since he is a scholar of metamodernism (one of the first to define the cultural shift!), we based the book cover on his idea, an image that he and his colleagues could affirm was steeped and layered in metamodern meaning.
Greg knew he wanted a illustration for the cover so my roles in this project, besides illustrating it, were to steer the illustration style and to advise on compositional and color choices.
Key Words
Some key words that inspired this image and define metamodernism are, interiority, quirky, humanistic absurdity, hyper self-reflexivity, sensitivity (or sincerity), deconstruction, cuteness and warmth. As Greg described it to me, if postmodernism is a window to see through something, metamodernism is everything postmodern is but also says that we don’t need to suspend our disbelief to sincerely engage a story, we simply value stories—but we need to be aware that we’re engaging a story. Below are initial sketches.
Process
The illustration had two main evolutions—the first included an older TV. After some progress on those sketches, Greg and his colleagues realized the vintage television was confusing. Even if analog devices have made their way back into these times, the book cover still needed to convey that metamodernism was relevant to the current day.
The second evolution was in the illustration style. Changing offered an opportunity to refine stylistic elements, namely changing the line weight and adding more detail created more warmth.
Below are some highlights—a selection of finished sketches, that distinguish different stages of the process.
