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Tag: Jim Flora

Published September 22, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

Mambo for Fonts — Flora Mambo is a new font from the P22 Type Foundry based on Jim Flora’s hand-lettering for the 1955 Mambo For Cats RCA Victor album cover.

Character — Type designer Matthew Carter profiled in The Boston Globe:

Around 1994, he started developing Verdana, a revolutionary font for having prevailed over technical constraints of that time, like coarse computer screen resolution. To hear Carter recall it, it was a pivotal moment: People were on the brink of reading as much — or more — on screen than on paper. And that transition has had a profound effect on the design process.

Carter also talks about his work in this short video for the Globe (via Eightface):


The Paris Review has made it’s entire interview archive — from the 1950’s to the present — available online (via The NY Observer).

An Education — James Bridle of BookTwo and Bookkake interviewed at Publishing Perspectives:

“There’s still a reluctance in the industry to give [e-books] their own space. They are still subsidiary to the traditional book forms… There still an incredible lack of understanding about them and the people who are doing the educating are Apple and Amazon, which means they are taking the market very quickly and we’re kind of letting them do that.”

The Likely Lads — Authors Lee Rourke (Canal) and Tom McCarthy (Remainder, C) in conversation at The Guardian.

And finally…

Writers from The Guardian and Observer newspapers talk about the books that sparked their passion for literature:

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Published August 11, 2010

Midweek Miscellany


Typographic Sins Poster designed by Jim Godfrey (seen at For Print Only).

And on the subject of graphic design crimes…

Angry Paul Rand on Twitter (via @thebookdesigner):

My advice for designers & design students: fuck the rules, if your work is good enough to get away with it.

Boom — Alice Rawsthorn profiles Dutch book designer Irma Boom for the New York Times:

Ms. Boom, 49, has designed most of her books just as she has wanted. Typically, a book designer works with the text and images selected by the editor and art director, but Ms. Boom prefers to combine all three roles by deciding on the book’s structure and choosing the themes and visual material herself. She then obsesses over every element — not just how the book will look, but how it will feel and smell — and invents ingenious ways of achieving the desired effects.

One of her books was printed on coffee filter paper. Another was scented to smell of soup. A monograph of the work of the Dutch artist Steven Aalders was made in the exact dimensions of one of his paintings. The page edges of a book on the American textile designer Sheila Hicks were hacked with a circular saw to evoke the fraying edges of her work. The title on the white linen cover of a history of the Dutch company SHV only becomes visible after frequent use. There are 2,136 pages in that book, but no page numbers, to encourage readers to dip in and out.

An exhibition of Boom’s work, ‘Irma Boom: Biography in Books’ runs until Oct. 3 at the University of Amsterdam Library. The book accompanying the exhibition, designed by Boom and pictured above, is only 2 inches high, 1.5 inches wide and 1 inch thick.

And finally…

Enchanted Lion are reprinting Jim Flora’s kids books starting with The Day The Cow Sneezed in Fall 2010. Flora was best known his incredible jazz and classical album covers for Columbia Records and RCA Victor, and is officially awesome.

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Published June 6, 2009

Something for the Weekend, June 5th, 2009

Sweetly Diabolic — A new Jim Flora compendium from Fantagraphics.

I really, truly, wasn’t going to link to any BEA autopsies — and there are plenty out there — but on the eve of BookCamp Toronto I thought Brian O’Leary’s post seem pertinent:

It would be more than nice, more than fun, more than illuminating, if we as an industry could use events like BEA as less an opportunity to predict the future and more a forum in which to examine the options. Okay, piracy is bad, but.. what if it helped sell books? Okay, we love long-form fiction and we think it should survive, but what if the people who read it now just stopped? Okay, a trade publisher provides value in choosing and curating content, but what if the world turned upside down and everyone were a writer, a publisher, a reader… Wouldn’t that be really cool?

Fingers crossed for tomorrow… Follow along on Twitter. The event account is @BookCampTO. The hash-tag is #bcto09.

Access of Evil — More on Google’s big e-book adventure at Business Week. The ‘news’ is that Google will be offering online access to e-books rather than downloads. Which, if I understand it correctly, is what Shortcovers does already. Not that anyone is giving them credit for it.

The ALPHABET chest of drawers by Kent and London, inspired by vintage printing blocks: “The perfect place to file everything from A-Z!” (via source of all good things swissmiss).

The George Orwell Archive at the BBC (via The Book Depository blog):

For two years, between 1941 and 1943, George Orwell – real name Eric Blair – was BBC staff member 9889, hired as a Talks Producer for the Eastern Service to write what was essentially propaganda for broadcast to India.

From recruitment to resignation, this collection of documents reveals the high regard in which Orwell was held by his colleagues and superiors and his own uncompromising integrity and honesty.

The Wickedest Man in the World — Jake Arnott, author of The Long Firm, on how the very real Aleister Crowley became the archetypal fictional 20th century villain. Sadly Arnott doesn’t mention that Oliver Haddo, W. Somerset Maugham’s literary Crowley, appears in the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adventure.

The Future of Mainstream Media — a fascinating article about the success of National Public Radio (NPR) by Josh Catone for Mashable:

NPR’s amazing growth over the past 10 years prompted FastCompany magazine in March to call NPR the “most successful hybrid of old and new media,” and wonder if NPR could be the savior of the news industry. [T]hey owe that success to the culture of open access and audience participation that they’ve cultivated over the past decade.

And… OK I just can’t not link to Design Assembly‘s post about design-hero Wim Crouwel’s ISTD lecture.

Note: if you want me to link to your site, you just need to include a brilliant photograph of Wim Crouwel looking cool as f*ck and then use a genius soccer analogy:

“(For me) a grid is like a football pitch. You see a beautiful game of football, and then you see a not so beautiful one, but it all takes place on the same pitch”.

Yes. I am a cheap date.

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