Interview with Dr. Travis Kurowski on Selecting the YSW Cover

 

Dr. Travis Kurowski is a professor of Creative Writing at York College of Pennsylvania, where he teaches a variety of courses, including Literary Publishing and Student Publications. He also serves as the Production Editor for Young Scholars in Writing and is responsible for choosing the journal’s cover image. 

YSW frequently used the same cover image for each issue, but when the journal came to York College, the editors decided to change the image. “We wanted the cover to represent the issue, not just the ‘brand,’” Travis explains. “We wanted to focus on the experience of what the volume is and reflect its contents. We felt like the experience mattered.” Because of his background in publishing, Travis was asked to help with the cover design and layout. “We decided to outsource the layout to Parlor Press, our publisher, to create the layout. Dave [Blakesly] . . . created the layout pretty simply, and we made the decisions on the typeface, font, etc.” Travis typically chooses the images, and when asked about the process, he described it as similar to “writing a poem or a short story. It’s just a creative act where I had the experience of reading the issue’s contents, and the image is the result.”

Travis uses public domain databases to obtain the images, such as Splash and Public Domain Review, and chooses the image based on the issue’s contents. He explains that “as a research journal, we have to make sure that we copyright correctly by using images that can be found in a public domain.” While the cover image is often chosen using inspiration from a particular article in the issue, Travis ensures that the image is also representative of the rest of the volume. For example, the contents of Issue #18 seem to be responding to concerns regarding the pandemic and its relationship with identity and American identity. In the 19th volume, several articles related to the research of activism and protest within writing studies, so Travis found an image from a climate protest march in Sweden. “Each [cover image] responds to a particular article and then also a theme found throughout all of the articles…even within years, writers engage with the zeitgeist [of that time].” 

For Travis, the cover of an academic journal is of equal importance to its contents as it establishes the reading experience. “It's just like designing a plate of food or something. You want to create the experience for the readers so they can have that experience you want to help them have.” The cover image’s purpose, Travis explains, is to do precisely that: to set up the ‘right’ kind of experience intended for the readers.

This post was written by Lee Krauss.