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Penguin Books and Creativity magazine recently ran a Hearts and Minds Talent Competition for which entrants designed the cover of a book by Sam Taylor, described as “a chilling novel about the near future, where most of the world has been destroyed by catastrophic floods.” There were many strong entries. Shown below are four of [...]

It’s not unusual to see two or more books that use the same image. After all, professional designers tend to sample from the same stock image pools. What I find interesting about these two is the way the different crops and tones seem to adjust the dynamic between the figures.

Would you be more likely to [...]

The New York Public Library’s amazing and ever-expanding digital collections includes more than two thousand book jackets from 1926 through 1947. The library routinely removed jackets from books in its collection– no doubt because they quickly would become damaged or lost — but during those years some of its librarians kept interesting examples in a [...]

Jerry Levitan, working with direction Josh Raskin, illustrator James Braithwaite, and digital artist Alex Kurina, has produced an animated version of an interview he made thirty-eight years ago with John Lennon. Levitan was fourteen at the time, and Lennon was generous in answering his questions.
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via crap detector
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Getty Images has come up with an odd, inventive, and intriguing take on the streaming music service (pandora, last fm, etc.). Getty’s Moodstream combines audio with shifting still and video images. The user dials up a “mood” by adjusting sliders for such qualities as “happy” vs. “sad,” “calm” vs. “lively,” and so on. (Or you [...]

Are there fads in graphic design? Well, duh! Check out these eras of Olympics poster design.
1. 1912-1924: the homoerotic era

Here’s n interesting case study in how a final magazine layout is arrived at. The designer is Matt Willey, the magazine Royal Academy.
The title changes are amusing, in a wicked sort of way (I assume the endless revisions are coming from an editor) — at some point Wiley just stops entering the changes and [...]

Graphic designer Frank Chimero had the cool idea of comparing his silhouette to those of a bunch of famous people. He turned the project into a nicely designed little book. A selection from the book is on his website (though the text is too small, regrettably, for reading).
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Via Swiss Miss
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Caduceus asks that question at MetaFilter, and IndiaInk has started a thread in reply.
There have, of course, been many effects. some good, others not so good. Caduceus is probably asking for practical advice on using new technologies and media, but the question could also be answered in a broader sense. Following are a few consequences [...]

Book publishing has always been a little backward in some aspects of marketing. For example, while a graphic designer might produce several covers for a book, these are usually reviewed only by a select group of decision makers involved with its production and marketing. I’m not aware of many focus group tests, even for titles [...]

No, not op eds — op ads. I had forgotten how pervasive op art was in advertising of the 1960s and 1970s. It was also a period of increasingly globalism, as design fads trends quickly spread from one culture to another.
Italy produced some of the boldest op art ads, such as these ads for a [...]

Paul Rand offers some answers in this four-minute video. According to the youtube info, it was “created for his posthumous induction to the One Club Hall of Fame in 2007.”

In yesterday’s discussion of the map for my Persian ceramics book, I mentioned that I hadn’t settled on a map color scheme. Subsequently I decided to pick up the scheme from one of the objects in the book. Shown is a detail of that object, which I’m using as a section opener.
This is a [...]

After a long interval in which nothing happened, suddenly I’m back working on my little book about Persian ceramics (the trim size, 9.5 x 10 in., is small by museum publishing standards; it would have seemed large back in my text-based literary publishing days). This book required a map. I originally intended to send it [...]

Recently I had occasion to research rates charged by designers for text-based book work. I was trying to determine a reasonable price for a 320-page hardcover collected poems, interior and cover/jacket design. Since I have mainly worked with heavily illustrated books over the past decade I had lost touch with going rates for text-based projects.
According [...]

There’s a collection of supposedly x-rated movie posters from the 1960s and 70s over here. What’s a little surprising about the collection is that the graphic design is pretty good. And the posters are very tame by today’s standards. The years slip by, and you don’t notice these sorts of changes until you look back [...]

Barcodes are the graphic designer’s bane. I’ve tried to integrate them in designs through color and other placement, but you constantly run up against the distribution people who insist on conspicuous white rectangles, regardless of the context. (I’ve tested barcodes on color backgrounds and found that they scan perfectly well.)
So I love these creative barcodes [...]

Nice conceptual book cover, via Book Design Review. Literary aspirations can be a heavy burden indeed.
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An early printed bilingual dictionary, the Vocabularium Rerum provided German readers with the meanings of common Latin words and phrases. This edition (photo from Helga’s Lobster Stew’s photostream) was printed in Venice in 1495. According to HLS, the book can be seen”open to the public in the library at the Supreme Council of the [...]

via Hoefler & Frere-Jones