Here’s a fascinating 1947 documentary produced by Encyclopedia Britannica Films about the mass production of books:
(via Brain Pickings)
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Published March 8, 2011
The Casual Optimist Posts
Published March 7, 2011
50/50 Reinstated
Richard Grefé, executive director of AIGA, has announced that the 50 Books/50 Covers competition will continue:
In seeking to balance AIGA’s celebration of design in all its dimensions, we recently merged the historic AIGA competition for books and covers… into the broader competition, “365: Design Effectiveness,” which includes interactive, cross-media and print design. Book designers, publishers and admirers reacted strongly to this news with a public petition to “Save 50/50,” gaining more than a thousand signatures in mere days.
We have listened to these passionate voices in the design community, and we have reinstated “50 Books/50 Covers” as a distinct competition. Our intention was not to reduce our support for book designers, but to present AIGA as representative of—and respectful toward—all design disciplines equally. We apologize to those who construed the original decision as a reduction in AIGA’s commitment to the importance of book and cover design; that was not the intention, although it was clearly the impression. We also apologize for tinkering with something that is held so dear by so many; and we were remiss in how we vetted and communicated this change.
Thank you Christopher Sergio and Catherine Casalino for organizing the petition to save 50/50, and thank you AIGA for listening. YAY.
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Published March 7, 2011
The Breaking of Eggs: One Book, Three Covers
Books published in both the US and UK will often have different covers in each country. The UK and the US are, after all, two nations divided by a common language. Even so, I was still quite surprised by just how different the cover of UK paperback edition The Breaking of Eggs by Jim Powell (forthcoming from Orion, above right) was from the cover US edition of the same book (published by Penguin, above left).
It was Dan Mogford the designer of the UK paperback who pointed me in the direction of the original US cover, designed by Gregg Kulick. I had, it turned out, seen Gregg’s cover before — it had caught my eye in Paul Buckley’s book Penguin 75 — I just hadn’t realized it was the same book that Dan had just designed the cover for!
As Dan and Gregg’s treatments were so different, I thought it might be informative to ask them both about their designs. In the process, I came across Nathan Burton’s design for the UK hardcover edition of The Breaking of Eggs (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, above middle) — another, altogether different, interpretation of the same story. I thought it would be interesting to ask Nathan what he remembered from his design brief as well.
I’m grateful to all three designers for sharing their thoughts on their very different directions…
The Breaking of Eggs is the story of an old curmudgeon who learns to take down all of the walls he built around himself and really enjoy life. As a child, he flees Poland to escape the war and settles in France. As an adult he becomes a travel writer who focuses on the old communist block and is very much a communist himself. The rest of the world and its excesses annoy him and he shuts himself out. Slowly he breaks down the walls and visits his lost brother in America.
The title refers to a Joseph Stalin quote “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” and could be used as a metaphor for his own life. Or he as a child, he could also have been one of the broken eggs. Regardless, it was his mind that needed to be broken in order to live a truly full life. Which, is why I chose that imagery. The giant exclamation point was a homage to Rodchenko, who was a huge influence on my design as a student and who often used them in his design.
The map in the background just represents some of the places he wrote about as a travel writer. This was more of a request from editorial to show “place” on the cover and I think it was a very nice suggestion.
The publisher had tried a photographic route previously to commissioning me which hadn’t worked so they wanted an alternative approach. Buzz words they came up with were: cafe, espresso, napkin, beer, handwritten notes, cigarette smoke, a guide book on a table, a train. It was a case of combining this with a nod toward an Eastern European aesthetic to come up with the final design.
1 CommentThe previous incarnations of the jacket – on both sides of the Atlantic – had all been fairly quirky and lighthearted and the publishers were keen to open this book up to a different audience. Orion were quite specific about the direction they wanted to go with this – the phrase ‘traditional, sophisticated literary fiction’ was mentioned a few times!
The focus for this version of the jacket was to be the protagonist’s early year’s in Lodz, Poland around 1939 when he was abandoned by his mother. The brief asked for ‘a lonely looking boy in an urban Polish setting ideally with a woman walking away from him’ – this highly specific request meant I was looking at a composite image from the start, it was really a case of finding the right elements within a variety of period photographs then assembling them to tell the story you see in the final composition.
Published March 4, 2011
LetterMpress
LetterMpress is a project by graphic designer John Bonadies to create a virtual letterpress environment for the iPad that will allow users to create authentic-looking letterpress designs and prints:
The design process is the same as the letterpress process—you place and arrange type and cuts on a press bed, lock the type, ink the type, and print. You will be able to create unlimited designs, with multiple colors, using authentic vintage wood type and art cuts. And you can print your design directly from LetterMpress or save it as an image for import it into other applications.
The project has already reached its initial Kickstarter funding target to purchase complete collections of wood type, but no doubt additional funds will be useful. The type that acquired by LetterMpress will be housed at a new letterpress co-op called the “Living Letter Press” and project organizers plan to offer authentic letterpress prints from designs submitted by users in future.
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Published March 4, 2011
Something for the Weekend
Beep Beep — Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) reviews The Information by James Gleick:
As a celebration of human ingenuity, The Information is a deeply hopeful book. But it ends on an ambivalent note. The mathematical analysis of information, Gleick points out, entails the “ruthless sacrifice” of meaning, the very thing that “gives information its value and its purpose.” To the number-crunchers and code-wranglers who design our world-engirdling information networks, a message’s meaning is beside the point. A bit is a bit is a bit. As Shannon himself dryly noted, meaning is “irrelevant to the engineering problem.”
And yes, that cover was designed by Peter Mendelsund.
Beginners Edited — The original draft of Beginners by Raymond Carver compared with the final version of the story, retitled and published as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, edited by Gordon Lish. It’s from a couple of years ago, but still fascinating if you’ve never seen it (via Biblioklept).
Collector’s Items — The Guardian on the renaissance of chapbooks:
The 16th century merriments that became the chapman’s stock in trade were historically cheap, crudely made and illustrated using recycled woodcuts.
Today’s chapbooks, which are enjoying a revival along with independent regional publishing, bear little resemblance to the roughly produced books of the past. They are objects of beauty in their own right, with emphasis on original design as well as being a showcase for original writing. Pamphlet-sized but glossy, and more book than leaflet, they are highly covetable, which partly explains their appeal.
And finally…
A Curious Journey— The story of Margret and H.A. Rey, the creators of Curious George, at More Intelligent Life:
On June 12th 1940, the couple left Paris. The Nazis arrived less than two days later.
The Reys made their way to the south of France, and spent several weeks in a makeshift refugee camp in a high-school gymnasium before proceeding to Lisbon. From there they arranged passage to Brazil, and months later to New York. They carried with them the first drawings for the Curious George books, and showed them to police as proof of their occupation. The first book, “Curious George”, was published in 1941. The little monkey arrives in New York and strolls off of the ship with a smile, holding his papers in one hand and a little red valise in the other. A policeman salutes in welcome.
An exhibition of art by the Reys is on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco until March 13th.
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Published March 3, 2011
Save 50/50 Petition
Book designers Christopher Sergio and Catherine Casalino have created an website and online petition asking AIGA to reconsider its recent decision to end its annual design competition 50 Books / 50 Covers:
This year—after nine-decades—AIGA has decided to quietly discontinue the 50/50 competition.
Their decision was made without public announcement or explanation, and implemented without fanfare. The usual 50/50 deadline came and went, but the “Call For Entries” never went out. The presumption seemed to be that no one would notice its loss.
But people have noticed. And as it turns out, many of us care. In the few short days since the design community first realized what was going on, people have expressed the desire to preserve a competition dedicated solely to excellence in book design. There has been a common consensus that even in the digital age celebrating the physical book is important.
That is why we have created this website and online petition—to help spread the word even further, to give voice to a larger audience, and to perhaps see if enough momentum might be built to save the 50 Books / 50 Covers competition.
If you are a fan of design in any medium, or of reading in any format, we ask you to help us take a stand for the combination of both forms of expression.
50 Books/50 Covers is one of only a few design competitions dedicated to excellence in book design. It is important that it continues.
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Published March 2, 2011
Midweek Miscellany
The new cover for Daniel Clowes’ The Death Ray available this fall from Drawn + Quarterly. (The usual disclosure: D+Q is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).
The Enemy of Creativity — Jim Holt reviews Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows for London Review of Books:
It’s not that the web is making us less intelligent; if anything, the evidence suggests it sharpens more cognitive skills than it dulls. It’s not that the web is making us less happy, although there are certainly those who, like Carr, feel enslaved by its rhythms and cheated by the quality of its pleasures. It’s that the web may be an enemy of creativity. Which is why Woody Allen might be wise in avoiding it altogether.
A Machine To Think With — Paul Duguid reviews Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson, Publishing as a Vocation by Irving Louis Horowitz and The Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet for the TLS:
I. A. Richards called the book “a machine to think with”, yet it is curiously resistant to technological standardization. That point escapes many digitizing technologists, who are not perhaps the anti-book boors as sometimes portrayed… Rather they may be the last romantics, idealizing the book as a simple carrier of information and so one that submits unproblematically to their computer algorithms.
Unsolving the City — BLDGBLOG talks to author China Miéville about architecture and his recent novels The City and The City and Kraken. Fantastic stuff:
My intent with The City and The City was… to derive something hyperbolic and fictional through an exaggeration of the logic of borders, rather than to invent my own magical logic of how borders could be. It was an extrapolation of really quite everyday, quite quotidian, juridical and social aspects of nation-state borders… But I’m always slightly nervous when people make analogies to things like Palestine because I think there can be a danger of a kind of sympathetic magic: you see two things that are about divided cities and so you think that they must therefore be similar in some way.
The new covers for Miéville’s forthcoming book Embassytown, and his entire back catalogue with Pan Macmillan UK, were designed by Crush Creative.
And finally…
Handsome Boy Modeling School — A profile Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, in The New York Times’ Fashion and Style section:
Mr. Stein, an unabashed bon vivant who favors bespoke shirts and tailor-made suits by Kirk Miller, appears indifferent to accusations of pretension or dandyism… He has already cemented his status as a somewhat unlikely sex symbol (though among New York’s literary crowd, being pale, thin and occasionally bespectacled doesn’t count against you) with a practiced charm and habit of leaning in close and locking eyes intensely in conversation.
There is hope for us all yet… I just wish I could afford the bespoke shirts and tailor-made suits…
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Published March 1, 2011
Q & A with David Drummond, Salamander Hill Design
“I haven’t changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it…. It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That’s what modernism means to me…” — Paul Rand
There is something of a Modernist tendency in the design of David Drummond. It is not in a strict adherence to the grid or Accidentz Grotesk (or anything quite so obvious), but rather in the thought and purpose underlying his work. There is always a clarity and assurance to the concept and composition. There is never erroneous detail or ornament. Form most definitely follows function. To describe David’s work this way, however, is something of an injustice. His designs are far wittier (and much less pedantic) than one thinks Modernism ought to be. But then again, whoever said Modernism couldn’t be funny or irreverent? Not Paul Rand.
Perhaps it is simply better to say that David’s designs are the epitome of good ideas well executed. Their apparent effortlessness make it easy to underestimate his work. It is only when one tries to imagine how the cover could have looked otherwise that you truly realise his originality and what he has rejected or removed to get to his apparently simple designs. It should not be a surprise that Paul Rand is inspiration. After all, it was Rand who said:
“Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.”
Somehow that seems to get to the core of David’s work.
I am absolutely thrilled to post this interview. David’s work has received awards from AIGA, Communication Arts Magazine and Print Magazine and he is one of the finest book cover designers working today.
We corresponded by email.
How did you get into book design?
I was working in Montreal for an ad agency when I got a call from McGill-Queen’s University Press. On the recommendation of my sister, whose book they were publishing, they were interested in looking at my portfolio. That was the catalyst to start breaking out on my own.
When did you open your own studio?
I opened Salamander Hill Design in 2001
Approximately how many publishers do you work with?
I just checked the folder on my computer titled “Presses” and there are about 40 in there. Some are very active and some not at all. It kind of goes up down. Some of them are self published authors as well. There are maybe about 10 that I have longstanding relationships with that feed me with work pretty regularly.
How many covers do you work a season?
Hard to say really. I have so many that are all at varying stages of production. Right now, if I count the books on my list, there are about 30. What I have come to realize is that it is really important for me to always have a lot of work on the go. It helps to keep me in the zone where I can do my best work. I really do think the creative faculty is like a muscle that you have to keep flexing.
You were previously an art director for a marketing and communications company. Has this informed your book cover design?
This is going to sound funny but I wouldn’t really describe myself as a book cover designer. My approach to cover design is pretty much the same that I apply to any area of visual communication. I see the project as solving a visual problem, whether it is a book cover, illustration, logo or package design. Even though I have always entered work in book cover design competitions through the years, it has also been equally important for me to enter competitions like Communication Arts Design Annual to have the work judged in the larger context of graphic design as a whole.
Do you still do corporate identity work and packaging design?
Lately I have been getting back into identity work more and more. I guess I must have been missing it. Last year I decided to branch out and do some illustration work for magazines and that has been really exciting. The tight deadlines and fast turn-arounds force you to make decisions faster. I really hope to develop that more this year. Just last week someone e-mailed me about doing a poster for film festival in Italy. It always amazes me when a job like that lands in your in-box out of the blue.
Could you describe your book cover design process?
In a nutshell: present the cover brief to yourself as a problem that has to be solved. Then I try and bombard my brain with images from all kinds of sources to see if I can trigger something. For me it is about finding the visual hook. If that doesn’t work right away I tend to put it aside and take my dog Beau for a walk. I am sure all the local farmers that pass me on the road in their pick-up trucks must wonder about me and my dog walking far from home in all kinds of weather but I would honestly say it is an important part of my creative process.
I tend to like showing one concept whenever possible. I would say this is true for all of my design work. It shows the client that you have taken a stand and believe in the solution. That doesn’t mean you haven’t produced many different concepts along the way. I am sort of brutally self critical and if something isn’t working or if I am forcing it too much I put it aside and start again. I work with a lot of different clients with different protocols and some of them require that multiple concepts be presented up front. When that is the case I still try and make a strong case for the one I believe in.
I think the key to doing your best work is having a great client relationship. My brother is a poet and he compares publishing a book of poems to launching a pebble off the Grand Canyon and waiting for the sound of it hitting the bottom to come back to you. That is a bit the way I feel when I start working for a new client when you aren’t familiar with their approval process. Sometimes you launch your design out there and then — silence. I have a relationship with most of my clients where I know they want to be surprised by a solution. It does set the bar high each time but I need that challenge.
My wife works as a horse groom for a big show barn and gets up at 5:00 in the morning to get ready for work. Consequently I start my day around the same time. It’s funny — I live in farm country and basically keep farmer’s hours. The lights are also on in the neighbouring barns when I start my day. I focus on idea generation in those early hours and leave the more mundane production stuff to later in the day when my energy is flagging. The Tron, Inception, Dark Knight soundtracks come in handy at that point to keep me going.
What are your favourite books to work on?
Hard to say really. For the nonfiction stuff I love working on covers that have a great title that presents the subject in a new way. That really tends to help get the ball rolling.
What are the most challenging?
Books on the economy/Wall Street, Canadian Federalism, the Supreme Court, Native Peoples. I say this because I have done so many of them and each time you have to find a new way of presenting it. So far I have always managed to find a new take on it. I keep going back to the well and so far it hasn’t gone dry.
Do you see any current trends in book design?
Not a big fan of trends. Whenever I have been asked to judge design work for competitions the work that always grabs you are the ones that present a strong concept with a clean and simple execution. I think that is the key to producing work that is timeless.
Where do you look for inspiration, and who are some of your design heroes?
I look for inspiration pretty much everywhere. Paul Rand is a big design hero of mine because he kept on creating right to the end. I pretty much knew early on in my career that, because I’m such an oddball, the path of becoming creative director in a big agency was not really an option — not much of a schmoozer.
For me it has always been about the work.
Who else do you think is doing interesting work right now?
So many designers really. I would probably choose designers outside of the book design world like Montreal design firm Paprika — their work never ceases to surprise me.
What does the future hold for book cover design?
I truly feel privileged to get up in the morning and find a new design brief for a cover design in my in-box. Doing this type of work is a perfect fit for me and I hope to continue doing it for as long as it lasts.
And lastly… You (somewhat famously) live in a rural municipality in Quebec with a population of less than 500 people. What can you see from your studio window?
I live in a big rambling farmhouse built in 1825 on about 140 acres of land in Elgin, Quebec. The back fence line is the American border. Our farm sits at the base of the Adirondacks just where the Chateauguay Valley begins. My office is on the second floor with a view out the back. The view is always changing. Depending on the time of the year there are sheep, cows, horses, wild turkeys, deer, and an assortment of barn cats outside my window.
Wonderful! Thanks David.
David’s work can be seen at his blog and at the website for Salamander Hill Design.
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Published February 28, 2011
Hitchcock and the History of Movie Trailers
If you are still stewing over last night’s lacklustre Oscars (or even if your not), take a listen to Terry O’Reilly’s entertaining history of movie trailers for The Age of Persuasion. He kicks it off with this genius trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds:
And, for it’s worth, movie trailers were originally created to get people OUT of theatres, not into them. Brilliant.
Listen to The Age of Persuasion podcast:
CBC RADIO: AOP GOES TO THE MOVIES
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Published February 25, 2011
Something for the Weekend
Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, has posted an amazing selection of vintage French photographic noir book covers at John Gall’s blog Spine Out.
On the Defensive — Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask, on teaching creative writing in The Financial Times:
When you teach creative writing, you are already on the defensive. People love to poke you in the chest and cry, “But you can’t teach writing!” This is precisely what I think about automobile driving but I let them rant while I rub the sore part where they poked me. I don’t know why people get so worked up about this subject. Nobody has asked them to teach creative writing or even to learn it. Apprenticeship, the sharing of history and technique, has always been a central feature of art-making. Yet people cling to a romantic idea of the self-made genius toiling away in a garret or napping undisturbed in a sleep module.
Books on Wheels — A really lovely article about bookmobiles from the Smithsonian Magazine:
Bookmobiles, the man said, had been a fundamental inspiration while growing up in rural Mississippi in the mid-1960s. The public library had been closed to blacks—but the bookmobile stopped right on his street, a portal into the world of literature.
The gentleman was W. Ralph Eubanks: today an acclaimed author, and Director of Publishing for the Library of Congress… “The librarians did not care that I was barefoot, and wearing a pair of raggedy shorts. All they cared about was that I wanted to read—and to help me find something I would enjoy reading.”
Eubanks’ story is just one example of the pivotal role bookmobiles have played in literary culture, and individual lives, for more than 150 years.
Strides at The Strand — Nancy Bass Wyden, co-owner of The Strand bookstore in New York, interviewed in The Daily Beast:
We have taken strides to grow with our customers and listen to their needs. When customers started requesting New York Times bestsellers, we started carrying new books and featuring them on tables in the front of the store; when customers started talking about the Internet, we got online; when Amazon and B&N.com became “competitors,” we partnered with them.
And finally…
The Trial — Judith Butler in the LRB on the implications of the ongoing and complex legal battle in Tel Aviv over several boxes of Kafka’s original writings:
Comments closedHad the works been destroyed, perhaps the ghosts would not be fed – though Kafka could not have anticipated how limitlessly parasitic the forces of nationalism and profit would be, even as he knew those spectral forces were waiting.
Published February 23, 2011
Midweek Miscellany
The reluctant Daniel Clowes has a website. What the hell?
The Day The Movies Died — Mark Harris, author of the fantastic Pictures at the Revolution, on Hollywood blockbusters and the death of the great American movie. A really good read:
Which brings us to the embarrassing part. Blaming the studios for everything lets another culprit off too easily: us. We can complain until we’re hoarse that Hollywood abandoned us by ceasing to make the kinds of movies we want to see, but it’s just as true that we abandoned Hollywood. Studios make movies for people who go to the movies, and the fact is, we don’t go anymore—and by we, I mean the complaining class, of which, if you’ve read this far, you are absolutely a member. We stay home, and we do it for countless reasons… The urgency of seeing movies the way they’re presumably intended to be seen has given way to the primacy of privacy and the security of knowing that there’s really almost no risk of missing a movie you want to see and never having another opportunity to see it. Put simply, we’d rather stay home, and movies are made for people who’d rather go out.
You Can’t Learn Taste — A profile of Richard Russell, boss of London-based independent record label XL Recordings, in The Guardian:
This, after all, is a label that is thriving in an industry that is supposed to be dying.
“It’s not dying . . . it’s changing,” says Russell. “But then it always has been, as is the whole world. I just don’t think about the future at all. It’s not my responsibility.”
Really? He doesn’t have a strategy?
“Yeah – put good records out. That’s it. I’m sure there are people thinking about stuff like copyright and downloading, but . . . you don’t want an author to be thinking about Kindles and shit like that, do you? I mean, we do our best, but we definitely don’t offer any solutions for the music industry.”
And there’s the problem. You can’t learn taste.
Also in The Guardian, Barry Miles, author of London Calling: A Countercultural History of London Since 1945, chooses his top 10 books about London’s counterculture.
And finally…
Alan Arkin’s video for his new book, An Improvised Life, published next month by Da Capo:
Nice.
(via Jacket Copy)
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Published February 23, 2011
What is Graphic Design?
To explain what graphic design is, the UK’s Design Council talked to well known British graphic designers, including Neville Brody, about their work for a series of short videos:
The other films in the series can be found here.
(via FormFiftyFive)
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