Judge the artist by the book cover
By Frenche Brewer, brewer4@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-3691
Jessica Langs isn’t surprised or offended when a stranger stops to ponder her moniker, even though the spelling is slightly different. In fact, she’s come to enjoy the attention, since the once popular film actress, Jessica Lange has been introduced to a much younger generation through her appearance on cable in “American Horror Story.”
But, these days Jessica Langs, art student and “Jessie” to her friends, is getting attention for her own creative talent.
Langs is the winner of this year’s “First Year Reading Experience” (FYRE) poster design contest. But, for the first time, the design will also appear as the book cover for the FYRE tome, “The Postmortal,”which will be read over the summer by incoming freshman.
It’s a double honor that rendered Langs almost speechless when she found out she was the winner.
“I was lying in bed, and the first thing I do out of habit is check email and Facebook, and my teacher had announced ‘and the winner is…Jessie,’ and I was just in shock.”
The First Year Reading Experience poster contest is a class project for junior and senior ART 346 design students. The class gets the book and poster assignment in January.
“I read the book in about six hours and posted on my Facebook page, ‘you guys are going to love the book.’” “I love to read and this one was so fantastic and right up my alley,” Langs said.
Coming up with a design idea for “The Postmortal,” a thriller about a first-hand account of what happens when a cure for aging is discovered, took several fits and starts.
“It was maybe my sixth or seventh idea to do the evolutionary model, and initially, it looked a little bit different but I didn’t want the people to be so specific that you knew this was this person from the book. I wanted it to be generic enough that it could be anybody,” Langs said.
The art students have been designing posters for the FYRE for years, but this year, Mary Elizabeth Sewell, the associate director for University 101 had an idea to use the design for the USC book cover as well, and pitched the proposal to Penguin publishers.
“This is unusual but I thought it could be a great opportunity so I took a chance and reached out Penguin and the author and they were both excited about the idea,” Sewell said.
The books’ author Drew Magary said he was blown away by all of the student submissions, which he reviewed on CD.
“Take a bow, Art 346. You're going to rise up together and steal all the jobs from us old people and soon I'll be forced to subsist on live rats on and carry out end specializations on myself,” Magary said.
That high praise from Magary has confirmed Langs’ aspirations to have a career as a book cover designer.
“That made me blush so much because I was so impressed by his writing.” He instantly became one of my favorite authors and for him to say that, I was like, on fire,” Langs said.
When Magary comes to campus this fall to talk with students about “The Postmortal,” Langs will get to take her bow when she sits with the author on the stage.
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