Janice is well read.

Janice Wong lives in Montreal and makes things under the moniker run comrade. She is the senior graphic designer for the POP Montréal International Music Festival. She’s also one of the most talented people I know. We became good friends in high school because we shared two common interests: drinking wine coolers after hours in rock climbing gyms and having crushes on cute boys who made skateboarding videos. She has great taste in books.

What kind of a reader are you?
I am a gluttonous reader: I want to read everything all the time, and rarely get around to actually doing it! I read a lot of non-fiction when I’m researching for various design projects and almost inevitably, I end up scouring the author’s bibliography to decide what I should read next. I fell into a Haruki Murakami coma that has lasted about 2.5 years now. I love hearing what other people are reading and have become notorious for borrowing said books and never getting around to reading them… It took me something like 3 years to finally read my borrowed copy of On the Road!

Do you judge a book by its cover?
I ALWAYS judge a book by its cover! When I was a kid, before I even knew what design was, I wanted to make book covers for a living! I adore all the paperback covers that John Gall has designed for Haruki Murakami’s novels. I think it’s great that Murakami has consistently used Gall for all of his cover designs; it adds a nice consistency to the library of work. That being said, let me share some blasphemy with you: I don’t like the cover for What I Talk About When I Talk About Running designed by Chip Kidd (aka book cover god)!

What book has influenced you the most as a designer?
It’s hard to pick just one, since reading is such an instrumental part of my design process, but if pressed I think I would have to say Adrian Forty’s Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 is THE most influential of the bunch. It was the required reading for our second year Design History course. This book is important to me because it is the first time I read an articulate argument for why design is important to every aspect of our lives. This book laid the foundation for my design philosophy and it opened my eyes to the notion of “designer as decorator” versus “designer as change agent,” which is what I hope to do with my career in design.

What book do you pretend to have read, but never actually have?
I pretend that I’ve read my copy of World Changing, but really it’s just a huge brick that sits on my book shelf. I’m not even sure if I like Sagmeister’s design of it, it doesn’t really make for a very inviting book to read.

If you were a book, what book would you be?
I would be Type Addicted: the new trend of a to z typo-graphics because I am type!

Janice’s Must Reads
Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami (but you have to read A Wild Sheep Chase first)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Natural Capitalism: Creating the next industrial revolution by Paul Hawken
A Paradise Built In Hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster by Rebecca Solnit