Skip to content

Tag: Typography

Published January 23, 2009

Something for the Weekend, Jan 23rd, 2009

Big Mouth Strikes Again — The Friday Project’s charming Scott Pack interviewed at North Meadow Media:

people who have dealt with me directly are pleasantly surprised that I am not the complete cunt I am sometimes made out to be. I am a bit of an arse but not quite as bad as my press would suggest.

Books Unbound — author Lev Grossman’s (much linked to) thoughts on the evolution of publishing for Time magazine. Meh.

Unhappily ever after — The Guardian’s Nick Laird  reviews Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, and asks is it “too good a novel to make a great film”?:

It is a solid and noble effort that succumbs to what should be a moral of literary adaptation: bad books can make great movies, but a great book hardly ever does. And though you can see what tempted the movie men – that great dialogue! those poignant characters! – with Yates it’s the sentences themselves that are truly panoramic, and no matter what you do, they’re going to get left behind.

That may all be true, but to be honest, the wayward casting in Sam Mendes film adaptation is so catastrophically contrary to the characters in my mind that I can’t bring myself to see it anyway.

BlogTO profile one of Toronto’s best independent bookshops Ben McNally Books. Lovely bloke that Ben McNally . BlogTO have profiles of other Toronto bookstores here.

Toronto gets another new literary festival. I can hardly contain myself.

The message is the subject — Jenny Tondera interviews Dutch designer Wim Crouwel, creator of the ‘New Alphabet’ (pictured above and famously tea-leafed by Peter Saville for the album cover of Joy Division’s Substance), about the Bauhaus for Geotypografika. Jenny also interviews Michael Bierut, Experimental Jetset, Steven Heller, Paula Scher, Ellen Lupton, and Jessica Helfland.

2 Comments
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.

Comments closed
Published November 26, 2008

Midweek Miscellany, Nov 26th, 2008

The Royal Mail British Design Classics: A set of first class stamps issued in January 2009 will commemorate ten icons of British design  including the Penguin paperback (pictured above).

“I wanted to put my money where my mouth is” — booktwo’s James Bridle discusses Bookkake at 3:AM Magazine:

“I’m a huge fan of ebooks, and read this way regularly, but I don’t feel the reading experience they offer is yet on a sufficient par with traditional books to offer them at any great price, and I also don’t feel there’s much overlap between those looking for ebooks and those who’d pay for the paper edition.”

Risk has its rewards: Barney Rosset — US publisher of Beckett and Chekhov — discusses Grove Press and his struggles against censorship in a rebroadcast interview from 1991 on NPR’s Fresh Air. Rosset received the Literarian Award for his service to the literary community at the National Book Awards ceremony last week.

“The Best Business Books of 2008” — A slideshow of Fast Company‘s picks of the year:

“The titles that follow run the gamut of what Fast Company covers: Innovation, creativity, design, sustainability, technology, advertising and marketing, global business, and entertainment.”

It’s a cutely eclectic list for sure — including travel books and a novel (and mercifully there’s no Godin or Gladwell) — but it’s not, perhaps, quite as imaginative as they think it is…

30 Inspiring Flickr Groups on Typography: A wonderful list for type geeks compiled by designer David Airey (pictured: “Big Yellow Bookshop” by ultrasparky seen in the Typography and Lettering Flickr pool).

Comments closed
Published November 19, 2008

Midweek Miscellany, Nov 19th, 2008

“We’re from Kodak, Apple, Google, Yahoo”: The Guardian profiles Blurb — a publishing company with nobody from mainstream publishing — that specialises in high-quality, print-on-demand, photography books. Very, very, cool.

Good news and bad news for online retailers: Statcan found that more Canadians are shopping on the internet, placing almost $12.8 billion worth of orders in 2007, up 61% from 2005. ComScore, on the other hand, have just released their monthly retail e-commerce sales estimates, showing that online spending in October 2008 grew by only 1 percent over October 2007–the lowest monthly growth rate since they began tracking e-commerce in 2001.

Victor & Susie: A brightly coloured “children’s book for adults” about Susie and Victor the snail, all drawn with letters and punctuation marks, published by Brighten The Corners (pictured). (via drawn)

“A kind of slow-motion suicide”: David Carr’s column for the New York Times looks at why firing their the most talented, experienced employees to cut costs backfired for Circuit City and will do the same for newspapers too:

“Right now, the consumer has all manner of text to choose from on platforms that range from a cellphone to broadsheet. The critical point of difference journalism offers is that it can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio and provide trusted, branded information. That will be a business into the future, perhaps less paper-bound and smaller, but a very real business.”

My take on this for book publishers (as it normally is): Publish less, publish better — quality matters. (via reveries)

Comments closed
Published September 30, 2008

Mickey Smith – Volume

Volume by artist Mickey Smith is a lovely photographic tribute to bound periodicals and professional journals in public and private libraries:

The irony and graphic quality of repeating titles fascinate and draw, no matter how mundane, from known to obscure, from Vogue to Blood. I focus on simple, provocative titles that transcend the spines on which they appear.


(Thanks Siobhan!)

Comments closed