What to Say Next by Sarah and Larry Nannery
What to Say Next. Successful Communication in Work, Life, and Love with Autism Spectrum Disorder was written by Sarah Nannery and published by Tiller Press in 2021:
Using her personal experience living as a professional woman with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Sarah Nannery, together with her husband, Larry, offers this timely guide for anyone on the Autism spectrum looking to successfully navigate work, life, and love.
The book jacket was designed by Patrick Sullivan, a 2012 Cooper Union graduate in Fine Art who served as the art director of Tiller Press from April 2019 to May 2021, and then moved on to art directing Simon Element, another non-fiction imprint of Simon & Schuster.
Sullivan chose Schick Toikka’s Saol Display for the title, in Black and Black Italic styles. By repeating the words, with the first line shown cropped at the bottom and the second one at the top, he found a clever typographic representation for the topics of sequence (“What to say next?”) and (dis)order. Saol Display is a contemporary interpretation of quirky serifs from the late 1800s. This provenience becomes evident in the overlapping diagonals in W and y. Saol Display’s italics with the beautifully calligraphic x put emphasis on the word “Next”.
The smaller type is interesting, too: the sans serif is from Core Circus, a type system by the Korean S-Core foundry. It comprises numerous effect fonts with outline, inline, shaded, dotted and striped styles, intended to be combined in layers for multicolor compositions – hence the name. Here we get to see its plain style. Core Circus is an all-caps design. However, the fonts contain two sets of capitals: while the glyphs in the uppercase have open apertures, those in the lowercase have closed forms. It looks like Sullivan didn’t actively alternate between the two flavors; he rather simply applied standard title case spelling. The resulting divergent forms for C and S nevertheless introduce an element of slight irritation that plays up the topic of disorder. Core Circus is paired with Bodoni Italic.
