Archive for November, 2008

New Maps of Hell

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

Let that be a lesson to you. 6 different font styles and still awesome.
(via io9)

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Happy Beer & Food Day Thanksgiving everyone!

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

This isn’t a book cover, but it may as well be.

(In case you’re not familiar with the story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the tale of a man who begins his life as an apparent septuagenarian and grows younger every year.)

A nice treatment from Juniper Grove:

And most interesting of all, Jonathon McNicol, the guy who manages Chip Kidd‘s website, has typeset the entire book and put it up for download as a PDF.

The whole thing kicks off with a beautifully typeset cover. Get the whole thing here.

Print Regional Annual featured book covers

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

We finally got our hands on the Print Regional Annual.

MIDWEST:

↑ Art Director: Jill Shimabukuro
Design/Lettering: Natalie Smith
Photo: Robert N Davis Collection, the New York Public Library
University of Chicago Press

↑ Art Director: Jill Shima
Designer: Isaac Tobin
University of Chicago Press

SOUTH:

↑ Art Director: Mark Ross
Designer: Mary Hooper
Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville

EAST:

The Official Nancy Drew Handbook

↑ Art Director/Designer: Bryan Ashburn
Illustrator: Jesse Ewing
Quirk Books, Philadelphia

↑ Design Firm: High Design, Athens NY
Designer: David High
Photographer: Anna Beata Bohdziewicz

↑ Designer: Michaela Sullivan
Photographer: Jayne Hind Bidant
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston

↑ Designer: Alex Camlin
De Capo Press, Cambridge MA

↑ Designer: Emily Gutheinz
The MIT Press, Cambridge MA

NYC:

↑ Designer/Illustrator: Rex Bonomelli
Photographer: Rick Fischer
Doubleday/Broadway

↑ Design Firm: Ben Gibson Studio, Brooklyn
Designer: Ben Gibson
Illustrator(s): Ben Gibson, Jonathan Bennett
Penguin USA

Mules and Men

↑ Designer: Gregg Kulick
HarperCollins

↑ Art Director/Designer: Phil Falco
Illustrator: Drew Struzan
Scholastic

↑ Design: Julianna Lee
Little, Brown & Company

↑ Design: Henry Sene Yee
Picador

↑ Design Firm: Ben Gibson Studio
Design: Ben Gibson
Penguin

Nice macro shot of this one here

↑ Illustrator: Jennifer Wang
CD: Paul Buckley
Penguin

Physical, James Mcmanus


Art Director: Henry Sene Yee
Illustrator: Christoph Neimann
Picador

Winston Churchill, James Keegan

↑ Art Director: Roseanne Serra
Designer: Jennifer Wang
Penguin

Great book.

Send Me, Patrick Ryan

↑ Art Director: Paolo Pepe
Designer: Joe Montgomery/Wednesday design
Photographer: Andrew K Davey
Bantam Dell

Embryo Culture, Kohl

↑ Art Director: susan mitchell
Designer: Charlotte Strick
Illustrator: Margaret Cusack (She specializes in textile illustrations!)
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

(Best image we could find sorry)

The Fortune Cookie

↑ Art Director/Designer: Anne Twomey
Photographer: Elizabeth Watt
Hachette Book Group

Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me

↑ Designer: Paul Sahre
Photographer: Michael Northrup
Hachette Book Group

Against Happiness

↑ Art Director: Susan Mitchell
Designer: Jennifer Carrow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Frankenstein

↑ Creative Director: Paul Puckley
Designer/Illustrator: Daniel Clowes (fun fact: Clowes did a lot of the illustration for OK Soda)
Series Concept: Helen Yentus (our credit, not Print’s)
Penguin

Men of Letters and People of Substance

↑ Men of Letters & People of substance
Design Firm: De Cicque Design
Design: Roberto de Vicque de Comptich
David R Godine

The Jewish Messiah

↑ Art Director: Darren Haggar
Designer: Christopher Brand @ Rodrigo Corral Design
Penguin

The Chess Machine

↑ Design Firm: gray318
Designer: Jonathan Gray
Art Director: Darren Haggar
Penguin

The Monster of Florence

↑ Design: Flag
Photographer: Ian Lloyd / Masterfile
Hachette Book Group

The Expeditions

↑ Art Director: Paolo Pepe
Design: Roberto D Vicque
Photagrapher: McDermott and McGough
The Dial Press

The Ten Cent Plague


Art Director: Susan Mitchell
Illustrator: Charles Burns
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The big winner? Design Related. My goodness who isn’t on that site these days?

speaking of Pynchon…

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Apparently he’s got an honest-to-gawd, irony-free, hard-boiled detective novel coming soon. “Conversational Reading” has an excerpt.

So let me get this straight… “The Goddamned” Frank Miller designed an edition of Gravity’s Rainbow, but when Pynchon writes a real noir novel we get this?

Peter Mendelsund has a blog

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Oh dang.
Make sure you read the part about his ghost/celebrity sighting of Thomas Pynchon.

*cough*increaseyourtypesizeplease*cough*

Gesundheit.

Mendelsund’s portfolio

(via Books Covered)

SciFi redesigns

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Designer Heman Chong has taken it upon himself to redesign the covers of SciFi classics. It’s a subject that’s close to our hearts, so we’re more critical than we would be otherwise.

We applaud the effort, and in theory we love what he’s done here, but the final product comes up a bit short. We love DIN as much as the next design nerd, but the type seems half-again larger than it needs to be, and the geometric shapes are great, but the majority of them don’t relate back to the story in any decipherable way and seem to be little more than decoration. Maybe that’s the point? Hard to say without a concept statement of any sort.

Either way, it’s a great effort and we’d love to see more of this kind of thinking. Check out the full set at his website.



(via vvork)

Sam Potts Inc.

Monday, November 24th, 2008

At some point in the last couple months, Sam Potts updated his site and no one told us.

As I’m sure is the case for a lot of people, Potts came to our attention through his work on the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.

Surprise of all surprises, he’s done a bunch of other solid work. Here’s a small handful, filtered for contextual appropriateness:





How to Design a Book Cover

Monday, November 24th, 2008

And now you know.

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Japanese book covers from Grain Edit

The Accidental Zionist

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Image is a reworked Shutterstock image. I had to widen the aisle and add those strips of metal that form the bus part of the star. – David Drummond

The Uncrowned King’s Uninspired Cover

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Kenneth Whyte, editor in chief of Macleans magazine, has an interesting writeup of the cover design process for his latest book, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst.

Passionate about the topic and frustrated with the solutions being provided to him by Random House, he goes from passive to obsessed, refusing to promote the book unless the cover gets to a point where he’s happy with it. Ultimately, he concedes and accepts the design provided by RH’s in-house staff.

Covers matter. At Maclean’s magazine, we sell between 7,000 and 21,000 copies a week on newsstands, and the most obvious variables week to week are the cover subject, the cover image, and the cover line, which means that when we nail a cover, we can sell three times as many copies as when we don’t.

I offered my editor a long but polite list of suggestions for alterations to her proposed covers. … It wasn’t long, however, before I was drafting designers of my acquaintance in Toronto, Montreal, and New York to produce alternatives to what I was now referring to as “the atrocities” coming out of the Random House art department.

My assistant said, “I bet they hate you at Random House, but I guess you’re used to that.”

The final design, put out by Random House Canada:

We can’t say we blame him for his frustration. The provided cover isn’t exactly inspiring or inspired. For someone used to dealing with the high-impact, competition-laden world of the magazine rack, we can see how it would appear muddled and clumsy. We count three images, 3 typefaces, five font-styles and outlined text, all of which varies slightly between browns and greys. The images used are ambiguous, providing a hint of more information but not really delivering on the promise, providing a lot of noise for little payoff.

We prefer the cover put out by Counterpoint publishing for the same book. There’s not much to it, but at least the tone looks important and on the level with similar titles about Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, or Rockefeller.

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

(via ffffound)

The Art of the Movie Poster

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

The Chronicle Books Blog has a nice writeup about the cover design process behind one of their latest design books, The Art of the Movie Poster.

The one on the bottom right is our favorite:

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

(via The Strange Attractor)