Zone Books

Zone Books is an influential and acclaimed nonprofit publisher of academic books in visual studies, cultural history, political theory, philosophy, and related subject areas. I have been the art director for all Zone publications since 2002, designing over fifty volumes. 

For the majority of Zone titles, I create the jacket design and oversee typesetting, page layout, and production. My approach to the covers extends and expands upon the direction established by Bruce Mau in the late 1980s: a filmic horizontal image with bold cropping and a vivid palette. The series has evolved with a more figurative approach to imagery and subtler refinements to typography. Each volume requires extensive collaboration with the publisher, editor, and author to distill and express the sensibility of the argument in a distinctive form. 

Also for Zone I have designed special-edition volumes with extensive visual documentation related to contemporary political issues (such as The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories), as well as two new series formats: one for a set of books on nongovernmental politics, and Near Futures, an exploration of the effects of neoliberalism on civil society and activist responses to these conditions.

See list of titles below.

Cover designs

• Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion
• The Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation in Mulla Sadra
• Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple
• Anachronic Renaissance
• The Ancient Phonograph
• Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage
• The Chinese Pleasure Book: Sustaining Engagements in Early China and Beyond
• Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe
• The Civil Contract of Photography
• The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art
• Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions
• The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture
• Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers
• Death and the Idea of Mexico
• Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages
• The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork
• Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum
• A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination
• Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language
• The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations
• The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760–1830
• The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World
• Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media
• The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History
• Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance
• Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts
• History and Obstinacy
• In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal
• The Inner Touch: Archeology of a Sensation
• The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City
• Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time
• Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond
• A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity
• Myth and Thought among the Greeks
• No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming
• Objectivity
• Operatic Afterlives
• The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals
• Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency
• Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I
• Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics
• Profanations
• Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality
• The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón
• Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia
• Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection
• The Signature of All Things: On Method
• 1668: The Year of the Animal in France
• Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation
• Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing
• Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness
• Walled States, Waning Sovereignty
• Who Are You?: Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe

Special editions

• Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics
• Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability
• Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide
• The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Near Futures series

• Family Values: Between Neoliberalism And The New Social Conservatism
• Portfolio Society: On The Capitalist Mode Of Prediction
• Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age
• Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution

Series on nongovernmental politics

• Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property
• Nongovernmental Politics
• Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Politics