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Theres one big thing about Rodrigo Corral that does not initially make sense: The book cover maestro does not have a signature style. Consider his chameleonic cover hits. The Fault in Our Stars. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Survivor, Lullaby and the rest of Chuck Palahniuks catalog. Rachel Cusks books. James Freys controversial A Million Little Pieces, the cover that helped launch Corral into ubiquity. Recent collaborative output like Intermezzo and Mojave Ghost. The books don’t have obvious visual connective tissue between thembut somehow, as creative director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and his eponymous studio, Corral has spent the past three decades quietly redefining the look of the modern book again and again. [Photo: Michael Schmelling] A thing that we repeat often in the studio is, ‘Let’s be careful of what we’re good at, because it is the kind of work that you will attract,’ he says. Corral has heeded that caution throughout his career, avoiding pigeonholes and a life of designing the same jacket over and overwhich is notable in a design subset often particularly driven by trends. Consider the Big Book Look of the 60s, or the ubiquitous Book Cover Blob that seemingly seeped onto every jacket a few years ago. If a style has a proven track record, risk-averse publishers or marketing departments are quick to embrace it. Corrals output, which often feels consistently contemporary, is novel for its sheer novelty. Book covers usually follow trends, Frey, one of Corral’s earliest clients, told me in an email exchange. Someone makes a great one and everyone else copies it. If you care about such things, and I do, and try to find who made the original great one, its always Rodrigo. [Photo: Michael Schmelling] GETTING WHAT YOU CAME FOR Corral was born and raised on Long Island, New York, the child of immigrants from Colombia. His parents ran a travel business together, not entirely unlike how he and his partner Anna Corral operate his personal studio today. Books didnt play a huge role in his youth, but when he was around nine or 10, Corrals parents bought him a set of Encyclopedia Britannicaand he savored their object quality. I’d start cracking them open and appreciating the materials, the foil stamping, the faux leather, he says, recalling how the anatomy section featured acetate layering for the nervous system and the muscular system. Those are my closest earliest memories of a book experience. After realizing design and art was a path he wanted to pursue, he applied to the School of Visual Arts, where he found himself studying under industry icons like Chip Kidd and Barbara deWilde. They just always had a smile on their face, he recalls. And their work alone, it just had wit, it had charm, it had layers. And that really for me was like, ‘OKI think I’d like to join the space, or at least try my hand at it.’ After leaving SVA, Corral got a job at Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1996, where his first assignment was a paperback edition of Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student’s Guide to Earning a Master’s or a Ph.D. The book already had cover art, and he was disappointed that he didnt get to infuse his own creativity into the project. Then he decided to make the best of it. The all-yellow cover featured a black-ink New Yorker-style illustration of a person hoisting a degree into the air. He made the diploma white to highlight its importance of, well, getting what you came for. It was a tiny victory, but perhaps an important early lesson in how one can infuse their perspective into an at-times rigid paradigm. [Photo: Rodrigo Corral Design Studio] On the whole, Corral loved his early days at FSG, especially because it was an environment where young designers got to sit in on meetings and where the publisher would walk the halls and greet everyone personally. Designers and their work were valued, which helps explain why its a house with a long history of fantastic cover outputfrom Joan Didions Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Lawrence Ratzkin) and Tom Wolfes The Right Stuff (Kiyoshi Kanai) to contemporary jackets like Jonathan Franzens Freedom (Charlotte Strick) and Tove Ditlevsens Copenhagen Trilogy (Na Kim). Farrar, Straus and Giroux has always been a powerhouse literary publishing house that is editorially driven. And what that means from a design standpoint is we’re not reacting to what the markets are asking us, Corral says. It’s strong points of view with brilliant editors and a publisher at the helm [who] are reacting through fiction and nonfiction to what the world is telling us, in many ways. And so that all leads to supporting great design. After five years at the company, Corral says there wasnt much room for upward movement, so he left and did a stint at Grove Atlantic, fllowed by Doubleday. He was laid off in the post-9/11 publishing downsizing, but was given nine months severanceand thats when he started Rodrigo Corral Design Studio. He opened it in the back of a friends production house, A2A Graphics, in Chelsea. And soon after he took on his first project: the cover for A Million Little Pieces. [Photo: Michael Schmelling] REDEFINING THE BESTSELLER But two decades on, you can probably instantly envision itthat outstretched hand, the kaleidoscopic candy dots, that hospital-hued background. Frey had no clue what Corral was going to turn in, but he did have high expectations for the cover to his addiction saga. With a background in art and art history, Frey had been sending Corral paintings of hell by old masters and related imagery. Thankfully, he ignored them all and made his own cover, Frey recalls. When I saw it, I was initially taken aback. Visually, its very arresting, jarring. It felt sharp, dangerous. It also felt lonely, and somehow broken. All of which were a reflection/representation of the text. Frey, who also worked with Corral on his upcoming book Next to Heaven, says he didnt respond for a day. He let his feelings settle. [Photo: Michael Schmelling] And when they did, I was in love. Corral came up with the idea on the way home from his studio. He would often walk past a particular confectionary shop. A package of candy dots in the window always jumped out at him, and as he was pondering Freys book, it clicked. He took his entire fee for the project and hired a photographer, and the two brought the cover to life. Ultimately, Corral says the publisher didnt quite know what to make of it, and found it to be off-puttingbut they said they couldnt stop looking at it. It yielded a visceral reaction. It cemented the tone for the kind of work we wanted to attract, he says. We wanted to do work that was not fitting nicely and neatly into a category and that did not necessarily fit the mold of what a bestseller must look like. Catherine Casalino remembers the early days at Corrals studio. She joined as an intern in 2003, and soon became full time. Rodrigo has made a habit of swinging for the fences, and he encourages anyone who works at his studio to do the same. A big part of that is constantly seeking out fresh inspiration and collaborators, she says. In an age where you can easily marry up a stock image and a font to create an instant cover, or make a living by producing the same style of cover over and over, Rodrigo pushes back against that kind of process. You hire his studio not because you know what youre going to get, but because you know they can deliver something special that you would never have imagined. [Photo: Rodrigo Corral Design Studio] SOLVING THE BOOK While Corral may intentionally lack a signature style, he has a signature approachand it yields work that can feel urgently relevant. When hes designing, Corral starts with what he dubs bad poetryhe reads the manuscript and jots down quick notes in his phone. The ones that still resonate days or a week later are what hell start to focus on pushing forward. From there he concepts and designs. Sometimes hell start a cover and finish it completely. Other times in the studio hell have multiple people working on something. He likens the book design process to cinematography. To explain, he offers the concept of a book that has oranges as a theme. A cinematographer ponders, say, the temperature of the film, the color, whether its set primarily during day or night. I find that parallel with book covers, where it’s typography, it’s scale, it’s composition, it’s lightingand all those things can play into how that same orange can be very different on two different covers, he says. Current Random House vice president, executive art director Greg Mollica joined Corrals studio as a junior designer circa 2002/2003. Hes a deep and close reader; hed read manuscripts all day, bring them home and read them again at night, and come into the studio the next morning with ideas and brilliant singular ways to execute them, Mollica recalls. What struck me first about his studio and process was that the fine art, photography, fashion and culture books outweighed the traditional graphic design books in his personal collection. He was always devouring images and collecting art. Art was everywhere. Rodrigo thought like an artistthats what separated him in the cover design world. In 2011, Corral rejoined FSG as creative director, and today that is officially his full-time job. The decision to return felt strangely predetermined, he says.When I looked at the publishing landscape [publishers and imprints], I kept coming back to FSG as the place where I could contribute and feel valued as a visual artist. He splits his time between New York City and California, and operates his independent studiowhich works across all publishing houses for projects or as a creative director at largeater-hours. At FSG, he says he works with a team of experienced designers in a bit of an autonomous environment. On the studio side, he sees it as more of an agency model that utilizes Anna Corrals background in branding and marketing in chorus with his creative direction. On the whole, How we try to look at projects is we’re not solving to a stylewe’re solving the book itself, he says. Casalino would seemingly agree. I think Rodrigos impact on modern book cover design is that he responds to the unique voices of modern literature in a way that truly reflects where modern literature is going, she says. I remember him saying that he got assigned Chuck Palahniuk initially because the writing was so unique that no one knew quite how to approach it. Instead of making those covers look like prior fiction, he reflected that unique language with a unique visual language. [Photo: Michael Schmelling] BY A SHOW OF HANDS Those who have passed through Corrals studio make up a remarkable roster. Theres Mollica. Casalino. June Park, Elena Giavaldi, Ben Wiseman, Liana Finck, Tyler Comrie, Jason Ramirez, Christopher Brand, Devin Washburn, and on and on. Today, he works with Adriana Tonello, Giacomo Girardi and a couple others. Corral wont take credit for any of their careers or talent. But he does have an impressive track record of hiring wildly talented individuals wherever he oversees designand that, perhaps, is his greatest contribution to publishing at large, beyond any single image. If you hosted a book design event in NYC and you asked the audience by a show of hands who has mentored/worked with Rodrigoover half the audience would raise their hands, Mollica notes. Hes mentored countless designers who are now exceptional art directors. The book cover industry would be completely different without Rodrigos influence. That is not an exaggeration. Hes our Paul Rand. For his part, Corral says hes always looking to surprise himself in his design workand whether at FSG or his own studio, he is always seeking to help his teams surprise themselves, too. I think Rodrigos work has encouraged more designers and publishers to push back against stereotypical cover design and rise to meet the incredible creativity that modern authors are producing, says Casalino. Or, as Corral puts itand likely put it years ago with that cover for A Million Little Pieces: Hopefully we’ve delivered projects that can be genre-busting or genre-breaking, and that can become little victories for the futurefor designers to say, Look, this book was successful with that jacket. Why can’t we as a house take that same leap? What is Rodrigo Corrals style? I don’t know. But if you spot a cover in a store that feels like it was designed and printed just moments before, theres a good chance I could guess who art directed or made it.
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During his family’s annual summer vacations on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, high schooler Ajith Varikuti began to notice something concerning. Homes on the narrow line of barrier islands that Varikuti had grown up visiting from his hometown Charlotte were no longer there. I started seeing more and more news articles about entire houses being completely destroyed. And it started clicking, because some of those houses that were being destroyed I’d seen in my previous years there, he says. Varikuti, who was then a 9th grade student, knew there had to be a solution. So, as part of a student design competition organized by the design software company Autodesk, Varikuti put his mind to coming up with a design for a home that could better withstand the extreme conditions of the Outer Banks. (This year’s student design competition, Make it Home, is open until June 30 for students 1321.) Ajith Varikuti [Photo: courtesy Autodesk] His design is a modular, 3D printed home that sits on flood-resistant stilts and can be disassembled and moved if its site becomes untenable. The design was the grand prize winner in Autodesk’s 2024 Make it Resilient design competition, with a $10,000 prize. To create the design, Varikuti taught himself how to use computer-aided design, or CAD, software, starting with an entry-level educational version called Tinkercad before moving on to Revit, the industry-standard 3D design program used by architects and engineers around the world. Using online tutorials, he learned how to use the software to develop a structurally sound design that could be segmented into individual parts or modules. I broke down each of the individual drawings into its own box, so that way you could build various combinations of houses with of the same set of modules, he says. I thought that was the most intuitive and allowed for the most freedom to design whatever house you wanted to. [Image: courtesy Autodesk] The resilient home design was influenced by his own interest in engineering, and specifically 3D printing, which he’d begun exploring during the pandemic. Before even starting high school, he had designed and printed his own toy, a knight on a horse. That experience made him think that 3D printing parts of the house could be a viable way to make its individual modules, and allow them to be both assembled and disassembled. Varikuti’s resilient home design also accounts for the extreme conditions of the Outer Banks, using simulations within the software tools to test its capability to withstand hurricane-force winds. He even reached out to a structural engineer at the firm AECOM to fine-tune his design. He pointed out various inefficiencies and inadequacies in my design, Varikuti says. I had too many pillars that were way too big originally. This input also led him to redesign the footings for the house’s foundations so that they wouldn’t be affected by potential frost heaving. [Photo: courtesy Autodesk] For a design created by a teenager, Varikuti’s is a surprisingly buildable concept, and one that could be a solution for the extreme conditions faced by the Outer Banks. There are currently no plans to get the house built, but Varikuti, who’s now in 10th grade, says the process of designing it has got him excited about creating projects that could get built one day. This entire experience has made me realize how big of a world the engineering world is, and how there’s so many opportunities, he says. It’s led me to want to pursue a career in engineering, hopefully using CAD tools one day to make projects that will be implemented in real life.
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The Flying Sun 1000 is exactly what its name implies: a very powerful light source that flies. It is not as strong as the sun, but fitted with a powerful 3,333-watt light sourcethe equivalent of a typical flood lamp in a stadiumit is enough to turn night into day instantaneously.This drone is aimed at commercial and government users for the rapid deployment of industrial-level lighting solutions, such as construction and engineering jobs, area security, and disaster relief efforts that require 24-hour operation. A single operator can deploy the Flying Sun in minutes, instantly illuminating as much as 130,000 square feet.According to its manufacturer, Freefly Systems, the drone solves the problem of having to use traditional light towers for illumination. The Woodinville, Washington-based company designs and builds camera movement systems and stabilizers for cinematography. It says these are bulky, slow, and costly to set up, often leaving gaps in area coverage. But since the drone-mounted spotlight can move around, the Flying Sun can provide continuous aerial lighting that moves with work crews and rescue teams as they progress through an area. Furthermore, by eliminating the need for extensive installations of towers and cabling on the ground, the Flying Sun avoids risks in disaster areas, where theres often flooding and other potential electrical and trip hazards. The company also points at a less critical but potentially game-changing use: lighting for film and television productions, which can benefit from the drones ability to turn night into day in a split second.Not like a helicopterPerhaps a spotlight doesnt sound like a game changer for these industries. After all, you can light up the ground using a helicopter and a spotlight. But helicopters have huge associated costs and generate thundering noise and wind (not to mention that their operation time is limited). The Flying Sun can fly tethered to a power source in the grounda 5kW generator, batteries, or electric vehicle will workwhich allows it to fly virtually forever. This is a lot of power, so the drones lamps get hot. Freefly says it designed a system in which the LED light panels are kept cool by the drone operation itself. It utilizes the downwash from the Alta X drones propellers to actively cool the LED lights. This efficient cooling system is crucial for enabling the LEDs to operate at high power levels without overheating, which could damage the components or reduce their life span. This effective thermal management contributes to the manufacturers claim of thousands of hours between light service. [Image: Freefly Systems]How bright is it?The system consists of four panels of 72 LED lamps mounted on an Alta X heavy-lift quadcopter, an industrial drone platform manufactured by Freefly Systems. Thats a total of 288 high-power LED lamps that can generate an astonishing 300,000 lumens, which is a typical amount for modern LED lights used in football stadiums, baseball fields, or large concert venues.The Flying Suns lamp array offers a 60-degree spotlight, which translates into a wide coverage area even at low altitudes. At about 100 feet, the system covers approximately 14,000 square feet at 10 foot-candles, which is the typical lighting of a hallway or a mall parking lot (for comparison, urban street lighting goes from 2 to 5 foot-candles). Thats enough intensity to work seamlessly as if in daylight. As the drone gets higher, the coverage area gets wider. But that comes at the expense of light intensity: At 316 feet, the drone will light a 137,000-square-foot area but only at 1 foot-candle (more than moonlight, less than a streetlight). So while it is dim, its usable. And theres the option of combining several Flying Suns to cover more area with more intensity. Granted, at $60,000 a popincluding the tethered power cables and control systemthat wont be cheap. But it beats the cost of the installation of posts and flood lamps. While the Flying Sun 1000 drone may have higher up-front costs (10 lamps and poles cost about $20,000), it offers significant long-term savings due to lower operational expenses, reduced labor (theres no setup crew required), and minimal maintenance. The drone also provides superior coverage, instant repositioning, and enhanced safety by eliminating ground hazards. While traditional systems are cheaper for small, fixed installations, this droneor similar solutionswill be the best choice in dynamic environments like emergency response, construction, or large-scale events, where mobility, rapid deployment, and energy efficiency outweigh initial investment. Also, the drone will have a lower environmental impact, since no installation and removal are required. The more I look at the video, the more it feels to me like this is the typical how the hell didnt anyone think about this until now idea that is both brilliant and truly game-changing for a lot of industries.
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