granta

“Spot gloss on the molecules” — David Gee’s cover for 7 Good Reasons Not To Be Good by John Gould.

Going Back — Artistic Director Michael Salu on the creating the cover of the new issue of Granta magazine:

For this concept to work, we needed to strive for authenticity – to create the physical object ourselves. The typefaces would need to be sourced, traditionally hand-set and photographed to give the cover the depth that the issue deserves. For this I approached St Bride Printing Library, which has long been a place of fascination and wonder for me. My first visit to the library – with its oil, wood and metal, its smell of history – made a huge impression on me.

The Connoisseurs — Peter and Charlotte Fiell, who recently ended their 15-year tenure as heads of the design branch of Taschen, talk about their new publishing venture Fiell at More Intelligent Life:

What is design? It’s the forethought that goes into the making of man-made things. It’s films, pharmaceuticals, airplanes, chairs, tape recorders … it’s the world of stuff. It’s huge, so everybody should have a big interest. It’s not some avant-garde, highly expensive niche. We want to make money by publishing books that sell, but we’re in the business of promoting ideas, culture, taste, connoisseurship. If you want to make a difference you want to get into as many people’s heads as you can and change their opinion. The secret is to strike this balance between making your books appealing to learned type readers, while at the same time, making them useful and interesting to novice readers. Our aim is to make books as appealing to teenagers in Tokyo as architects in Amsterdam.

(Above: Spreads from Tools for Living: A Sourcebook of Iconic Designs for the Home by Charlotte and Peter Fiell)

Designing In Order To  Eat — Chris Ware’s introduction to Penguin 75 excerpted at GQ magazine:

Book designers, you should know, have to be ready to create something new, exciting, and original almost every day in order to eat, and a certain degree of burnout smokes out the weaker specimens; I can’t imagine coming up with cover after cover without at some point resorting to an out-of-breath take, intentional or not, on someone else’s great idea. This urge toward ever-freshness brings the profession perilously close to that of fashion, and the worst examples of such greet us at the grocery store checkout among the tabloids, gum, and ring pops. But the best of it, those that last, have recently been appearing from Penguin (yes, Penguin, not just the bearer of boring spring break assignments anymore!), following a path led by designer Paul Buckley into beautiful new ways of graphically proffering the written word.

The excerpt is accompanied by a slideshow of covers from the book. My interview with Paul Buckley and designer Christopher Brand about Penguin 75 will be up early next week.

And Finally… The book cover design Tumblr (via Alan Trotter’s ≥ notes)

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