A design:related interview Rich Roat, co-founder of House Industries, about starting a foundry, type trends, and the future of type design on the web:
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Published July 15, 2010
The Casual Optimist Posts
Published July 15, 2010
Waiting for “Superman”
After posting about Newsweek‘s report on education and declining creativity in America yesterday, this amazing animated infographic created by Buck for the documentary Waiting for “Superman” seems awfully relevant:
Made by David Oscar-winning filmmaker David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), Waiting for “Superman” is a documentary about the American public education system and how it is failing kids. You can watch the trailer here.
(via The Donut Project)
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Published July 15, 2010
The Creativity Crisis
Newsweek reports on research that shows, for the first time ever, American creativity is declining:
With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling…
The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.
(via More Intelligent Life)
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Published July 14, 2010
Midweek Miscellany
The portfolio of Julia Hastings, Art Director of Phaidon Press (via It’s Nice That).
Rarefied Content — Alan Rapp on the future of photography books at Imprint:
[A]rguably the independently published photo book is flourishing. You can see this from the increasing popularity of on-demand printing services such as Blurb, Lulu, and MagCloud , as well as the number of successful and well-published photographers who have launched their own publishing ventures, such as Alec Soth, Richard Renaldi, and Shane Lavalette (a practice which itself has a long pedigree, from Alfred Stieglitz to Ralph Gibson). Yet this kind of kaleidoscopic output creates another issue—who but the most ardent follower can keep abreast of this vast dispersion of small-scale publishing?
The Illustrated History of Time designed by Luke Hayman at Pentagram:
And finally…
The trailer for the animated adaptation of Shaun Tan‘s The Lost Thing (via The Art Department | Irene Gallo):
I’ve posted this before, but here’s a short documentary about making the film:
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Published July 12, 2010
Penguin 75: Q & A with Paul Buckley and Christopher Brand
Launched with 10 titles by Allen Lane in 1935, Penguin Books turns 75 this year. To commemorate the anniversary, Executive VP Creative Director Paul Buckley has compiled Penguin 75, a collection of 75 book covers from the Penguin US archive.
Penguin 75 is an inside look at the Penguin design process with candid and irreverent commentary from authors, designers, editors and artists as well as Penguin Art Directors Darren Haggar and Roseanne Serra and Buckley himself. Filled with the kind of distinctive illustrative covers that are now associated with Penguin US, the book is wonderful slice of American book cover design. As Karen Horton recently noted in her interview with Buckley for design:related:
“Penguin 75… is less about the history of the old orange-spined paperbacks and more about the relationships Creative Director Paul Buckley helped to facilitate in the last decade between publisher, editor, author, and designer.”
I was lucky enough to talk to Paul and the book’s designer Christopher Brand about Penguin 75 last week.
How did Penguin 75 come about?
PB: I’ve always had a mix of fascination, disdain, and understanding, for what my staff and I go through in trying to get our work approved, as well as what the editors and publishers are dealing with on their end. Of course all people whose work is subjective go through some sort of approval process — and it’s not easy for the folks on the other end of the situation either; the ones saying “this is just not right”. As it’s something we do not hear much about (other than at some industry function), I thought it would be interesting to put some of these stories together in book form.
And how did you get involved in the project, Chris?
CB: I was working on staff at Penguin at the time. I let Paul know that I would be interested in working on it when he first mentioned the project to everyone. I mostly work on covers but I’ve had the chance to work on a few interiors before this one.
What criteria did you use to choose the covers?
PB: There were different sets of criteria; the most obvious being that they had to be Penguin paperbacks, as we had decided to use this project in conjunction with our 75th Penguin imprint anniversary. Another criteria was that I wanted to show recent Penguin work, so nothing older than 10 years or so. Then it came down to a combination of which covers look great and also have an interesting story associated with them, as well as trying to get a mix of intriguing authors and designers in there — not just your obvious fiction darlings, but a true microcosm of the publishing world and art world.
The covers are very different from the iconic Penguin paperback covers. Do you think the book shows a different side to Penguin’s design history?
PB: Of course. Penguin UK does a gorgeous job of tapping into the Penguin archive and history, and while I like to go there from time to time, I’m very interested in Penguin’s future in a different sort of way. The beautiful Penguin by Design is just not who I am, and if I tried to do a version of that, two things would happen — I’d fail as my heart would not be in it, and no one would buy it as it’s already out there in a few books. This is not to say that I’m not a huge fan of Penguin’s design history — I am, but I see it as a place to tap into occasionally, while still moving the brand forward — as nothing creative can remain as it was, nor should it if it wants to stat vital in it’s own day. But we do maintain Penguin’s age old love of illustrated and well crafted covers.
Do you have a sense that Penguin US has a design sensibility that is separate from the Penguin UK tradition?
PB: Whether you’re UK or US, it’s still Penguin tradition, so I don’t define it as you do. Both sides are very proud of Penguin, it’s history, it’s cache, it’s values — and both sides have built Penguin into what it is today, and what it stands for. So while we are separate entities that bring different things to the table, the overall strive to keep the quality bar set very high is paramount to either side.
Was it hard to choose just 75 covers?
PB: Unbelievably hard. That ate up the first month or so, just getting it down to 75, who was left in, who was left out, who on staff has five covers in, while another has only one or two, is it a good mix visually and editorially of this and that, etc etc.
Chris, did you have a say in any of the selections?
CB: Paul did an initial edit and went through tons of the books. Once he narrowed it down I helped a little bit with figuring out what we should put in, but mostly I would come to Paul later on when were trying to lay out the book. If we couldn’t get enough content for one of the books then we would have to find another one to put in. Or, if Paul wanted to add more books toward the end then we had to figure out what to subtract. I was more involved when it affected the design.
Were there any covers or comps that you wanted to include but couldn’t?
PB: By the nature of only utilizing 75 covers / series, things have to be left out. So yes, but only for that reason.
Penguin 75 includes contributions from authors and editors as well as designers, but I notice you left out Sales & Marketing!
PB: I did not leave out sales and marketing any more than I left out elves and leprechauns… I simply did not have any real sales and marketing stories. The Penguin marketing director, John Fagan, is hands down the best marketing director in the universe — we all know the horror stereotype stories of the marketing director killing this and that just to hear their own voices in the room, but John is so much an integral part of our team and loves what we are doing with our packaging; so unless he really thinks we’re missing something, he’s incredibly supportive; and when he does have something to say, he still manages to do it in a kind and intelligent way. Our sales team also leaves that stereotype behind. Trust me, you see in the book that I’m not pulling any punches and I made sure no one else in the book did either — so if I had great Penguin sales and marketing stories, you’d be reading them.
As a designer, were you surprised by any of the comments from authors and editors about the cover designs, Chris?
CB: The range of comments from the authors was pretty surprising. Some were very thoughtful and you could tell they appreciate and understand book cover design. Other authors weren’t very happy with their covers and they made that pretty clear.
Was it fun to design a book about book design?
CB: More than anything, it was just fun for me to be working on the interior of a book instead of just the cover. It was a nice change.
Were there any unique challenges?
CB: The biggest challenge was that Paul and I were working on this book, but at the same time we both had full time jobs at Penguin. Paul tried to clear my plate for me a bit, but we both still had a lot of other responsibilities to deal with. Another thing that was hard was that we were sort of doing this whole thing on the fly. We were responsible for not just designing the book but gathering all of the content and all of the things that we needed to design the book (the comments, the hi-res art, etc.). We had to get everything together as we went and this stuff trickled in throughout the process.
On a design level, there was a lot of information to organize. It was challenging to come up with a system for everything. We had comments from that authors and designers, then there were comments from the art directors that we created another system for, all of the credit information for each book, we were showing alternative designs for some covers. There was a lot to think about.
Did you try to take account of Penguin’s design history while working on your design?
CB: I did take Penguin’s history into account at the beginning when we were figuring out what the layout should look like. I used Gill Sans throughout the book, but it’s pretty small and doesn’t feel overwhelmingly “Penguin”. I tried some things that were more in the style of older Penguin covers, but in the end we went with something more modern.
Was it strange to design a book that includes some of your own work?
CB: It was a little strange at first, but many of the covers in the book were designed by my co-workers so a lot of the work was very familiar to me.
So, did the book make you reconsider any of your own designs, or your design process?
PB: I’d love to sound thoughtful and say “yes” and expound on some brilliant new design wisdom — but the answer is “no”. All of the entries in this book are well known to me, and most have been for years. Putting them all down in one place just made me feel proud of what my department does — but I’ve always been incredibly proud of my team. If anything, it made me reconsider what it takes to put a book together, and see editors and authors in a more favorable light.
And, Chris, I have to ask… How does it feel to be immortalized on the cover of The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón?
CB: It was an amazing opportunity. I think this only the beginning of my modeling career.
Thanks Paul and Chris!
Images:
- Penguin 75 cover, design by Paul Buckley
- Penguin “Graphic Classics”:
The Dharma Bums | Art Director: Paul Buckley | Illustrator/Designer: Jason
The Portable Dorothy Parker | Art Director: Paul Buckley | Illustrator/Designer: Seth - Graham Greene Backlist | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley | Illustrator Brian Cronin
- Don Delillo Backlist:
Americana | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley | Photos: Jeff Brouws
White Noise | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley | Photos: Jason Fulford
Great Jones Street | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley | Photos: Hugues Colson (top), Tom Zimberzoff (bottom) - Emporium and unused image | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley | Illustrator: Viktor Koen
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley
- Pages 220 – 223 Penguin 75 | Designer: Christopher Brand
- Pages 244 – 247 Penguin 75 | Designer: Christopher Brand
- There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby | Designer: Christopher Brand | Illustrator: Sam Weber | Art Director: Roseanne Serra
- The Jewish Messiah | Designer: Christopher Brand art Rodrigo Corral Design | Art Director: Darren Haggar
- The Shadow of the Wind | Designer: Tal Goretsky | Art Directors: Darren Haggar and Paul Buckley
Published July 9, 2010
You Can’t Judge A Book By It’s Cover
Published July 9, 2010
Somthing for the Weekend
“Spot gloss on the molecules” — David Gee’s cover for 7 Good Reasons Not To Be Good
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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Published July 7, 2010
Midweek Miscellany
The Good, The Bad… — design:related‘s Karen Horton (also Art Director at Little, Brown and Co.) interviews Paul Buckley, Creative Director of Penguin US, about his new book Penguin 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary (The Good, The Bad…):
Everyone was asked to keep their comments to 100 words or less, and though there are a few exceptions that I let run long, my own included, most contributors stuck to my request. As to the sarcasm, there are plenty of good natured jabs throughout the book as I was very clear with the participants that this was a true opportunity to let it all out – if you hate your cover, please by all means tell us about it; that is the point of this book.
You can read my interview with Paul from September last year here, and I’m hoping to chat with him and designer Christopher Brand about Penguin 75 soon. Fingers crossed.
Rewound and Remixed — Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, interviewed in The Times:
If McCarthy… presents a radically fresh prospect for the future of the novel, it is probably, paradoxically, because he has instinctively ignored contemporary literature almost completely. He would argue, in fact, that it is only by immersing oneself in all that has gone before that any contemporary novelist has even the faintest chance of coming up with something new. “I don’t think most writers, most commercial middlebrow writers, are doing that,” he says. “I think they’ve become too aligned with mainstream media culture and its underlying aesthetic of ‘self-expression’. I see what I’m doing as simply plugging literature into other literature. For me, that’s what literature’s always done. If Shakespeare finds a good speech in an older version of Macbeth or Pliny, he just rips it and mixes it.”
See also: My Q & A with Peter Mendelsund and Tom McCarthy about the cover design of C.
Paywalls vs. Potential — Clay Shirky interviewed in The Guardian. This has been much linked to elsewhere because of Shirky’s comments about the online “paywall” at the aforementioned The Times, but I actually Michael Wolff’s Vanity Fair article on Rupert Murdoch from October last year is more interesting on this point. See also: John Gapper’s op-ed “Murdoch must become an elitist” in the Financial Times (registration required).
Necessary Agent — Jofie Ferrari-Adler, senior editor at Grove/Atlantic, on literary agents and their relationship with book editors in Poets & Writers Magazine. It’s an interesting article, although — just for the record — not everything that goes pear-shaped in the publishing process is the fault of the Sales & Marketing department…
And finally…
Cats Without Dogs — At some point I will shut up about Jason… Until then, you might be interested to know he has just started a blog…
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Published July 5, 2010
Jason, The Dharma Bums
As you may have noticed, I’m on something of Jason kick right now. I’m also preparing to interview Paul Buckley, Creative Director at Penguin US, about his new book Penguin 75, so I thought I would take the opportunity to post Jason’s beautiful contribution the Penguin Graphic Classics series that Paul art directed:
Published July 2, 2010
Something for the Weekend
Dieter Rams book by graphic design graduate Daniel Bartha:
This project was a book I created around the ten most important principles for what Dieter Rams considered was good design. Taking on board these elements myself, I took away as much as I could from his unique designs but to still leave them instantly recognisable.
And since I seem to be on a German theme this week…
Nabokov in Berlin — An essay by Lesley Chamberlain in Standpoint magazine:
As consumerism and Hitler rose together so Nabokov treated totalitarian politics principally as aesthetically repugnant. It was “another beastliness starting to megaphone” in Germany which in 1937 drove him and his half-Jewish wife Vera to leave Berlin for France and the US. It was almost too late. Berlin suited him. The anti-totalitarian novels Bend Sinister (1947) and Invitation to a Beheading (1938) which followed were remarkable, particularly the latter, for not insisting that totalitarianism’s victims were moral heroes, only men of taste. Nabokov, who saw in art the possibility of redemption, was tempted to think taste ruled out evil.
And from Germany, to France (via Norway)…
Master of Understatement — Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics, on Jason’s Werewolves of Montpellier:
[I]t’s possible to describe [Werewolves of Montpellier] by saying it’s a low-key domestic drama, with a Harold Pinter play’s worth of portentous silences, about a bored, disenchanted young man who’s in hopelessly in love with his lesbian best friend. Or you can say it’s about a jewel thief who discovers a secret cabal of werewolves. It’s true that you have to pay attention to catch the details: the fact that Jason draws everyone with animal heads makes it a little bit harder to read some of the characters’ interactions. But maybe Jason’s central joke is that you have to take extreme measures to create certain kinds of drama when a lot of the time people aren’t feeling anything in particular.
Techland also have an exclusive preview of the book.
See also: The Beat’s review of Werewolves of Montpellier…
Werewolves of Montpellier is about an art student/thief who dresses up as a werewolf before he goes out to break into people’s homes at night, which a society of actual werewolves is not amused about.
What that boils down to on the page, though, are scenes of people sitting next to each other at the laundromat, looking at each other in silence or talking about French actresses while playing chess—and each time, it’s utterly fascinating, and the scene draws you in almost immediately and you don’t want to stop.
Jason tells stories with comics in ways that never occur to a lot of people who make comics.
From Europe to Asia…
An Obsolete Practice — idsgn considers the end of movable type in China. Fascinating stuff:
The invention of movable type in China developed with Gutenberg’s mechanical press and hot type-metal, proved to have widespread and lasting success in Europe. But in practice, it was not suitable for Chinese—a language with over 45,000 unique characters. Typesetting in Chinese took “minding p’s and q’s” to a whole new level, and accuracy was challenging when characters were essentially compounds of many radicals and ideograms. Running a Chinese letterpress shop required an enormous storage space and basic literacy of at least 4,000 commonly used characters.
And on a strangely similar note…
Rudy Lehman’s Incredible Linotype Letterpress (via Coudal).
Have a great weekend!
Rudy Lehman’s Incredible Linotype LetterpressRudy Lehman’s Incredible Linotype Letterpress
Published June 30, 2010
Midweek Miscellany
Edward Gorey book cover set on Flickr (via This Isn’t Happiness).
15% of Immortality — Literary agent Andrew Wylie profiled in Harvard Magazine:
“The music industry did itself in by taking its profitability and allocating it to device holders. Manufacturing and distribution accounted for roughly 30 percent of the music industry’s profit. These were conveyed to Apple in the deal for iTunes. But why should someone who makes a machine—the iPod, which is the contemporary equivalent of a jukebox—take all the profit?… [Apple] couldn’t have sold the device without the music that was on it. Instead, why didn’t the music industry say to Apple, ‘We want 30 percent of your iPod sales?’ Or ‘How about paying us 100 percent of your music revenues—you keep your device profits, and give us our music profits?’ That’s not the deal that was made. And that is why the music industry hit the wall.”
“You just can’t kill us” — Publisher’s Weekly looks at the future of sales reps, “the roaches of the business”:
[T]he key to the rep business may no longer be synonymous with the key to the car. Independent reps continue to call on as many stores in their territory as possible, but they also tweet, blog, e-mail, Constant Contact, and GoToMeeting, as well as phone, to stay in touch with their accounts. “If there’s a rep who can call on an account in person, it usually benefits the account,” says Kurtis Lowe, head of group for Book Travelers West, who until last year was the only rep traveling to Alaska. Now he uses what he calls “a hybridization of personalization and electronic contact”… Reps now provide stores with a mix of sales, marketing, customer service, and pretty much whatever else is needed.
“We all have our fates” — Berlin-based Bookslut Jessa Crispin talks to Ulrich Ditzen about his late father, the author Hans Fallada, and the posthumous success of his novel Every Man Dies Alone:
It was the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg who first approached Dennis Loy Johnson at the publisher Melville House, saying it was a shame the book had never been translated into English. “She talked to the American publisher, why didn’t he publish this book, it was a fantastic book,” Ulrich said. “She was very surprised that it had never been translated. Dennis Johnson then read it and shared her opinion and proceeded to get it translated. And it was a runaway success, to my great surprise.”
And speaking of Berlin…
Because who doesn’t want a remote-controlled mountaineer’s harness to peruse their bookshelf? Dwell features the Berlin home of typographer Erik Spiekermann and his wife, designer Susanna Dulkinys:
2 CommentsInside, the house has a strikingly modern look… Which is not to say that there are no luxurious touches… [E]xtras include an ingenious, if terrifying, remote-controlled mountaineer’s harness that lifts browsers to the books on the two-story-high bookshelf (though they have to be careful not to run into the Ingo Maurer Zettel’z light). To avoid clutter, almost everything is built in, with cleverly designed zippered fabric panels on the walls working to hide plugs and cords. “It’s like creating white space,” says Dulkinys, “so you can free your mind and be creative.”