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Tag: Design

Published February 13, 2009

Something for the Weekend, Feb 13th, 2008

Apologies for the rant about the Globe and Mail this morning (note to self: don’t blog without coffee). Hopefully a highly-caffeinated design-heavy post for the weekend will make up for it…

First off, Jenny Griggs’ gorgeous typographic designs for Peter Carey’s backlist (pictured above) described by the great man himself as “A triumph!!!!!! Fucking fantastic!!” (Jenny talks about her more recent papercut designs at FaceOut Books)

M.S. Corley re-images the Lemony Snicket (pictured above) and Harry Potter series as Penguin Classics (via the BDR)

Metacovers — Joseph at the BDR looks at books on book covers (see above!).


The Way Through Doors — written by Jesse Ball; stunning minimal cover design by Helen Yentus for Vintage. Not quite a ‘metacover’ but I still love it (pictured above — seen at the Book Cover Archive of course)

Holey Font! – “How much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability?” EcoFont has tiny holes and uses up to 20% less ink. Based on Verdana, and developed by SPRANQ in the Netherlands, it’s free to download, and free to use. And it seems to work.

And lastly, The Book Depository Live — Watch what books people buy from The Book Depository around the world in real time. Very cool. (via @paperbackjack)

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Published January 23, 2009

Things We Didn’t See Coming

Love this simple, elegant cover solution for Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steve Amsterdam (seen at JACKET MECHANICAL):

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Published January 19, 2009

Vintage Paperback Illustrations

Sanford Kossin cover for Bantam 1957

What with the inauguration this week it seems awfully quiet on the publishing front right now. Maybe that’s just relative to the economic blitzkrieg that happened before Christmas or my twitchy unease about what horrible surprises 2009 might hold!

In any case, I’m going to use the lull as an excuse to post a link to Kyle Katz’s incredible, overwhelming, (possibly obsessive?) Flickr collection of vintage paperback covers, which I’ve had bookmarked gathering dust for about year… The collection has been loving arranged into various categories — including by the cover illustrator (!) — and, it is, in Katz’s words, “mostly pulp fiction, vintage sleaze, almost all mass market, and usually between 1940 and 1980, with a few exceptions.” But it so much more than that. It’s terrifying. And brilliant.

Alvin Lustig design for New Directions 1950

Link

(via Leif Peng’s marvellous Today’s Inspiration)

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Published January 17, 2009

More Vintage Penguins and Pelicans

Ace Jet 170 has just posted about a “brilliant and odd” vintage Penguin paperback design by Herbert Spencer (pictured):

And, what with the link yesterday to Things magazine’s collection of vintage Pelican covers, I thought I should also link to Ace Jet 170’s growing Penguin/Pelican Flickr collection.

Ace Jet 170

Ace Jet 170’s Penguin/Pelican Flickr Collection

UPDATE

Also: The Penguin Paperback Spotters’ Guide Flickr Pool

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Published January 14, 2009

Jules Verne Series at FaceOut Books

The featured work at FaceOut Books this week is 28-year-old Ely Sarig’s elegant–and unpublished–designs for Jules Verne’s classic 19th Century science fiction novels 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (above), From the Earth to the Moon (below), and The Clipper of the Clouds . The designs draw inspiration from Victorian industrial design, pirate ships, WWII submarines and spacecraft. Does it get any better than that?

Link

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Published January 6, 2009

Interview with Coralie Bickford-Smith

Penguin Books award-winning book cover designer Coralie Bickford-Smith (mentioned previously here and here) discusses her experiences, influences, book cover designs, and more, in a great interview over at design:related :

When I feel intimidated I just start making stuff so that before I can get frozen, something interesting is already grabbing my attention and keeping my mind occupied. As every designer has a different approach to a title, I try not to think “what would so-and-so do” and instead remind myself that my own approach is what I should be aiming for. Books are rich, wonderful things – there’s always something new you can bring out of them. Some people have to keep finding ways to package soap powder – I’ve got a lot more to go on with Crime and Punishment.

Link

(via The Book Design Review)

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Published December 11, 2008

Midweek Miscellany, Dec. 10th, 2008

NPR’s Best Graphic Novels of 2008 include Josh Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Goodbye, and Alan’s War by Emmanuel Guibert (pictured). There’s an excerpt available of each book selected. Nice. (Thanks Ehren!)

A new way to express an old idea – An interesting interview with Canadian designer David Drummond at Books Covered (via Design Observer):

I tend to start with a list of words. For example I am working on a cover now that is about a dog but can’t show the dog on the cover. I like those kind of problems. How do you show this without showing it?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezo is PW‘s Person of the Year.

“Suburban surrender”: James Wood revisits Richard Yates’ blistering novel Revolutionary Road in the latest The New Yorker.

Little to do with books – The New York Times looks at the infighting and the politics of book groups:

Yes, it’s a nice, high-minded idea to join a book group, a way to make friends and read books that might otherwise sit untouched. But what happens when you wind up hating all the literary selections — or the other members? Breaking up isn’t so hard to do when it means freedom from inane critical commentary, political maneuvering, hurt feelings, bad chick lit and even worse chardonnay.

Russell Davies on “analogue natives”:

So much joyful digital stuff is only a pleasure because it’s hugely convenient; quick, free, indoors, no heavy lifting. That’s enabled lovely little thoughts to get out there. But as ‘digital natives’ get more interested in the real world; embedding in it, augmenting it, connecting it, weaponising it, arduinoing it, printing it out, then those thoughts/things need to get better. And we might all need to acquire some analogue native skills.

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Published December 10, 2008

FaceOut Books

FaceOut Books, updated every Monday, is a fascinating website about the practice of book cover design:

“This is not a blog to rip apart what we dislike—everyone has a different aesthetic. This is a blog about the challenges and outcomes of a project. We are here to teach and be taught by one another.”

The post from December 8th is by Charlotte Strick who designed the cover for Roberto Bolaño’s much lauded 2666 (pictured):

It’s a designer’s dream to have a mysterious, numerical title to work with. I was a big fan of Rodrigo Corral’s jacket design solution for “The Savage Detectives” (FSG, 2007), so that made it an even greater challenge to take on what is considered by many to be the late author’s “magnum opus”.

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Published December 7, 2008

Interview with Carin Goldberg

Success Secrets of the Graphic Design Superstars interviews design doyenne Carin Goldberg. Goldberg has designed book covers for just about all the major US publishers, including Simon & Schuster, Random House, Farrar Straus & Giroux, and Harper Collins:

Book jacket design was not as “sexy” or as visible then as it has become. Art directors at that time had more control. There were fewer, if any, marketing meetings or other sorts of group decision making that often dilute the creative process. It was an easier, more rewarding time to be designing covers.

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Published December 7, 2008

100 Design Book Covers

100 Design Book Covers at Visual Evasion. Amazing (via A Whole Lot of BS):

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Published December 7, 2008

Tschichold: Titan of Typography

The Brillance of Jan Tschichold — Richard Hollis at The Guardian looks at the career of the man who perfected Penguin’s classic paperback:

Tschichold tidied up the horizontally banded covers of the standard Penguins and refined the Penguin emblem. Each of these adjustments hardly changed what we now think of as the “classic” Penguin designs, but the effect was to set new standards for book production in England.

The Guardian also has a slide show of Tschichold’s poster and paperback designs

If you’d like to know more about Tschichold, Thames and Hudson have just  published Jan Tschichold Master Typographer by Cees W. de Jong,  and Raincoast are distributing Hyphen’s Active Literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography by Christopher Burke — published in March 2008 — here in Canada.

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Published November 19, 2008

Waterstone’s Hardback Classics

More lovely book designs by the very talented Coralie Bickford-Smith at Penguin UK (mentioned here previously for her work on the Gothic Reds series) for a collection of classics available at British book retailer,  Waterstone’s:

“All the books in this series have patterns that adhere to a strict grid… I have a real enthusiasm for pattern design so I was obsessed with this project. I wanted to create sumptuous books for people to enjoy, cherish and pass on.”


Penguin have very kindly put all of the covers for the Waterstone’s Hardback Classics on their Flickr photostream. It really is a beautiful set.

Coralie recently won an award for best ‘Brand or Series Identity’ at the British Book Design and Production Awards, for her work on the Classic Boys’ Adventures series, which is brilliant too.

Link

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