Books, Design and Culture
Earlier this week I received a copy of the 2016 Australian Book Design Awards Catalogue designed by Alissa Dinallo. My photos don’t really do it justice, but it is a thing of beauty:
You can buy a copy of the catalogue from the ABDA wesbite.
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For the past few years, Quill & Quire (magazine to the stars) has asked Canadian books designers choose their favourite covers of the year. This year, however, instead of choosing a book cover like everybody else, David Gee picked out the McGill-Queen’s University Press Spring 2015 catalogue designed by David Drummond.
After laughing pretty hard at Mr. Gee’s audacity (and his transparent attempts to never work in this town again), I realised I would love to do a post on great catalogue covers.
Print catalogues can be beautiful things, and as David Gee himself points out, “the simple fact that publishers’ catalogues tend to fly under the public radar doesn’t mean they’re easy to design.” They’re are also an endangered species. Publishers are cutting costs, and most are switching to digital alternatives. Now would seem like the perfect time to celebrate the charm of the print catalogue before it disappears completely.
I don’t usually ask for submissions, but I don’t think I can possibly gather enough material together for this by myself. So if you’ve ever toiled thanklessly over a publisher catalogue and you’d like to see a little appreciation for your hard work, send me an email (hello [at] casualoptimist . com] with your favourite catalogue covers (and interiors if you wish), and I’ll showcase all my favourites in the New Year. The images should be hi-res jpegs or pngs (at least 620px wide), and please be sure to include the publisher information, and all the relevant credits.
Thanks all.
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Picador Paperback have posted their fall catalogue to Facebook. Apparently they also did this with their spring list too . Needless to say, I think this is a great idea. Is any one else doing it? (via Arthur’s Design)
Control — An interview with Alan Rapp, former senior editor of art, design, and photography at Chronicle Books and the new Associate Director of Hey, Hot Shot!:
for all the possible flaws in the trade publishing model, one thing I always liked about it is the collaborative process. It defies the auteur model; the author is almost never the sole creator. I suppose that this could sound like the ex-editor making a case for the value of his role in an industry that is really undergoing massive and fundamental changes, but I stand by the principle: all content benefits from editing. The author, whether a verbal or visual one, is almost always too involved with the material to see how it can be best adapted to another form. And the design and production processes are also critical to making the best book possible; one thing [that] I think is in danger of getting lost in self-publishing is the production potential. The physical aspects of books make important, and often subliminal, effects on the reader, but we are getting a much more homogenized offering through the current self-publishing models.
Final Crisis — A short Q & A with Chip Kidd about designing comic book covers at the NY TImes‘ ‘The Moment’ blog.
And finally, thinking of comics, Will Kane (The World of Kane) recently posted some mind-blowing pop-art pages from French comic “La Vie Privée de Dyane” drawn by Michel Quarez, published in 1968 (pictured below). Also check out Will’s post on Quarez’s 1967 Mod Love.
