Kim Neill at kimcreativestar.com tells you how to bake them.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Pantone Chip Cookies

Project Thirty-Three aims to connect the dots:

The seemingly infinite number of vintage record jackets that convey their message with simple shapes like the dot never ceases to amaze and amuse me. Project Thirty-Three is my personal collection and shrine to these expressive dots along with their slightly less jovial but equally effective cousins; squares, rectangles and triangles, and the designers that make them come to life on album covers.

*

via Swiss Miss

*

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Project Thirty-Three

1. Producing two or more design concepts that are very similar
2. Adding things in rather than taking them away
3. Concentrating on features rather than benefits
4. Not targeting the right audience or having enough gravitas
5. Not presenting the finished design in the best way possible.
6. Not sketching first
7. Underselling your design work

Read more at Graphic Design Blog.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Mistakes designers make

Craig Mod makes an interesting case for celebrating the (supposed) demise of “disposable books” — he elaborates at some length a simple distinction between books where the content and form are integral and those where they are independent — and welcoming the IPad as a reading platform. Here’s a sample:

We’re losing the dregs of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.

These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

Once we dump this weight we can prune our increasingly obsolete network of distribution. As physicality disappears, so too does the need to fly dead trees around the world.

You already know the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, born from a lower barrier-to-entry to publish. New modes of storytelling. Less environmental impact. A rise in importance of editors. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everything in that last paragraph were true! Unfortunately, part of this is fiction writing. Check out the NYT bestseller list and see if you can observe “a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed.”

To me the most interesting part of Mod’s argument is his vision for booklike content that disposes of the metaphor of the page, as shown in the image above (the image is Mod’s). In this vision the content metaphor is not the bound book but the East Asian handscroll, on which stories were rolled out continuously from one end to the other rather than proceeding page by page.

The book is a perfected technology, but why should the electronic platform inherit the binding metaphor?

*

Link: Books in the Age of the IPad

*

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

“Books” in the age of the IPad

The pages are the same, except that in one spread the main text block is ragged and in the other it is justified. I’m curious which version people prefer.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Rag or justified?

The first post at The Art of American Book Covers, by Richard Minsky, was made on August 26, so this blog is less than a month old. I regret that I don’t remember who directed me to it, but this blog is so rich in knowledge about techniques of book production that it makes me feel like an absolute novice. The blog will apparently focus on fine books of the nineteenth century. The image above is a detail from a book published by L. C. Page, who it seems offered each of their titles in red, white or blue cloth (wow!). Instead of stamping, a white cloth panel was glued onto the red and blue books. Following is a portion of the blog’s commentary related to this detail, but you should check out Minsky’s blog for the full story:

The panel on the 1906 variant is unusual. The white has a blue-ish cast, and blue is showing through the white where it is rubbed; white is showing through the blue where that is rubbed, and white is showing through the gold where rubbed. It appears as though a white cloth onlay was applied to the cover, which was then stamped with blue, then white, and finally with gold. The details show that the cloth for the panel was applied before the stamping, since the blue and gold both overlap the onlay on both variants.

Why would the stamping be done in white if the cloth were white? One possible answer is that by 1906 opaque white inks were available for the stamping that were not prone to flaking and produced a brighter white than the cloth color. That fails to explain why blue would be stamped under the white.

Regarding white stamping on white cloth, when I published Fantastic Tales by I. U. Tarchetti, translated by Larry Venuti, I put black cloth over black boards. My production manager thought I was crazy. Maybe I was. It’s a nice looking book though (the paper jacket is shown; maybe I will take a photo of the cloth cover later on sometime).

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Sites we like: The Art of American Book Covers

Recently Wired magazine asked a group of designerz to reenvision Craigslist. According to Wired, “Visitors arriving at craigslist are confronted by a confusing homepage cluttered with links most people will never click on. Overall, the user interface is in dire need of an organizing principle that guides you to the details you seek while filtering out extraneous information.”

The design above was submitted by a team from the NY Times led by Khoi Vinh (I  think — ironically, the Wired page is a little confusing and hard to follow). According to Vinh, “It feels more open, more nimble,” than the existing site.

I believe the weird little pointer thingees are not part of the design but were added by Wired to highlight elements of the design. Probably their colored circles are intended to signal something — but what?

The main functional difference appears to be that when you click on a section it opens within a window on the page rather than taking you to a new page.

All in all, the proposed redesign seems a reasonable piece of work. But I wonder how it would be received by the Craigslist community.

.

UPDATE: Khoi Vinh discusses the redesign on his blog.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Redesigning Craigslist

This is a logo for the imprint. I haven’t really decided on the color scheme yet. Any reactions? (Hmmm, maybe the graphics part should be a little smaller.)

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Hanuman Maximon

Over at Eye blog they’ve pitted Robert Klanten and Matthias Hübner’s Fully Booked against Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book in a book design battle.

Find out who wins.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Book design battle

There are special issues for American designers when working with Southeast Asian subjects. This book demonstrates, I think, how they can be successfully addressed.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Designing a book on Southeast Asian Art

I was looking for a video to help explain the Fibonacci sequence to someone who didn’t know about it. There are a lot of them that aren’t especially helpful. This one is okay (apart from the spooky music). Maybe a really excellent one will still present itself.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

The golden mean and the Fibonacci sequence

The design firm Pentagram was recently honored for its long-term collaboration with the Public Theater in NYC. The video includes more than 300 pieces.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

15 years of work in 45 seconds

From bulooji’s photostream.

.

via Fosfor Gadgets

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

A designer’s resume

Today even whole countries get brands. Consider these national tourism logos. Start with Colombia. Is it trying to establish itself as the world radish center?

Okay, it says “Colombia is passion!” so I guess that’s a heart. A heart attack? A heart on fire? Open heart surgery? Well it’s scarlet, so it’s passionate.

In any case, the logo seems to have worked, because it appears the design firm tweaked it and resold it to Dubai.

If Colombia says passion, and Dubai says . . . something about hearts, what does Chile say? Excitement? Fireworks? A mugging?

Hey, Colombia, watch out! This branding business is cutthroat! I think Turkey wants to cut into the radish trade.

And Hungary also has designs on the heart market.

Well, that’s enough of this. it could go on forever — just ask the Dominican Republic.

I don’t know what that thing is. Do you?

.

Some of the national brands are better than others. But one thing they all have in common — they didn’t come cheap. That’s because brands are the new snake oil — the suckers lap it up, and the branders rake it in.

Which of the national tourism logos do you think work best? What do you think of them as a whole? You can see the full set here.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Nation brands

This is a little map I did for Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam and Burma, 1775-1950, a catalogue of a forthcoming exhibition at the Asian Art Museum. The museum’s website says:

Thailand and Burma, neighboring countries that are approximately the same size in area and population, have many cultural features in common (Theravada Buddhism above all), but have traditionally been adversaries.

This exhibition of decorative and religious arts explores Thailand and Burma’s shared aesthetic despite their contrasting histories.

I do my maps in Illustrator. In this instance I used kuler to help me select colors. Originally both the historical map at left — which shows the bites England took out of Burma before consuming it whole — and the context map at right used the darker color scheme of the left map. The curator thought that was confusing because of the color key at left, so I just desaturated the colors in the map at right.

I could have inset one of the maps but I preferred to keep them separate.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Thailand – Burma Map

Or so it says here.

What is wrong with this picture?

.

Cartoon via Telec Thoughts.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

First rule of design?

1. The CMYK pen (via behance)

2. Hex values of crayola crayons (via eightface)

3. The periodic chart of typefaces (via swiss miss)

Case closed.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Design geekiness

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

The five rules of book cover design

Almost a year ago, the excellent India Ink was tagged for excellence in blogging, an award she rebranded as the Charles Montgomery Burns Award. Mr. Burns is the owner of the Springfield nuclear power plant on the Simpsons. Well, India’s blog is hot.

This is the exclusive award better known as the “excellent blogger award” — search those words and you’ll get more than a hundred million results. What a lot of excellence!

India (the only other India I know is the protagonist of Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge) characterizes the award as “a pay-it-forward linky thing.” The idea is that when you receive a Burns you pass it on to ten other blogs. This was one of the blogs she tagged, and I’m finally passing it along.

I don’t have a blogroll (instead I do link roundups must weeks), so this silly thing is my chance to highlight ten excellent blogs. I’ve tried not to duplicate blogs that already received the award. Of course many more could be named, but these are some I’d like to mention today.

1 Pieces and Bits. My sister’s fun, genuine, and unpretentious blog. A recurring topic is kayaking in Florida. (I would also mention my daughters’ blogs but I’m not sure they want the attention.)

2 The Weary Traveler. My colleague Jason Jose’s blog about travels in Europe. Jason has traveled to Europe every year for the past 13 years, and he has the photos to show for it.

3 Cheznamastenancy. This blog’s tagline is “eclectic ramblings from a long time San Franciscan,” but it’s actually a pretty focused blog directed to the subjects of San Francisco and its fine arts scene. I made Nancy’s acquaintance through my Frisco Vista blog.

4 Eightface.com. At Eightface Dave Kellam focuses mainly on design and typography. He kindly donated to this site the plugin near the top of the left sidebar that links to today’s entry on my book of days (this day in history). He would be a good person to be in touch with if you need a book designed.

5 Robert Peake. Robert Peake’s blog is devoted to poetry and poetics. It always thoughtful, informed by his capacious reading.

6 Madam Mayo. C.M. Mayo writes with wit and insight on creative writing, translation, and Mexican literature. She is probably disappointed that the Obamas chose a Portuguese water dog instead of a pug.

7 Pink Tentacle. I don’t know any of the people behind Pink Tentacle, a blog that pertains to my Asian art and culture site, 7 Junipers. Pink Tentacles always seems to come up with the most deliciously bizarre items related to Japanese art and culture.

8,9 Inner Diablog and La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo. I know these two through my site devoted to Mesoamerica and the Maya world, Buried Mirror. Inner Diablog is a completely original and personal blog that often references Antigua Guatemala. That’s where Rudy Girón does his extraordinary daily documenting of one of the world’s most fascinating cities.

10 Italy is falling. This blog is maintained by Ico, who wrote the Stray Random Quotes WordPress plugin that I use here (bottom of left sidebar and at my Museum of Folly site. Like, I suppose, most people, I dropped in to his site to pick up the plugin and read about it and kvech when something didn’t work and then split once that mission was accomplished. Only later did I realize what I’d been missing, as I came to appreciate the blog for its ruminations on Italy, gardening, literature, and more.

BTW, I didn’t care too much for the award logo (below) — it doesn’t say “excellence” to me (is it supposed to be ironic?) — so I whipped up one of my own, using the typefaces Amalia and Clan (above). Take your pick.

.

More posts on community.

• Mailbag: Bellemeade Books and Jonathan Williams
• Mailbag: Electric Literature 2 (and party)
• Will Powers (1946-2009) and "The Printer's Error"
• 100 Best Curator and Museum Blogs; Or, Link-building Made Easy
• Why are you here?
• Amazon's appalling policy
• Writers reading Right Reading
• Rethinking twitter
• Mutanabbi Street reading
• Should publishing be open?

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Charles Montgomery Burns Blogging Award

Crave that prominent-grid, basic-fonts, industrial design aesthetic? Massamo Vignelli  would tell you that you can’t just imitate the surface, which must emerge as an epiphenomenon from an essential spirit embuing the design at its most fundamental level. He has put a document called The Vignelli Canon on the web as a pdf. It’s worth consulting. A few excerpts:

The attention to details requires discipline. There is no room for sloppiness, for carelessness, for procrastination. Every detail is important because the end result is the sum of all the details involved in the creative process no matter what we are doing…. Design without discipline is anarchy, an exercise of irresponsibility.

…

Very often people think that Design is a particular style. Nothing could be more wrong! Design is a discipline, a creative process with its own rules, controlling the consistency of its output toward its objective in the most direct and expressive way.

…

Visual strength is an expression of intellectual elegance and should never be confused with just visual impact – which, most of the time, is just an expression of visual vulgarity and obtrusiveness.

…

The smaller the module of the grid the least helpful it could be. We could say that an empty page is a page with an infinitesimal small grid. Therefore, it is equivalent to not being there. Conversely a page with a coarse grid is a very restricting grid offering too few alternatives. The secret is to find the proper kind of grid for the job at hand.

…

The advent of the computer generated the phenomena called desktop publishing. This enabled anyone who could type the freedom of using any available typeface and do any kind of distortion. It was a disaster of mega proportions. A cultural pollution of incomparable dimension.

…

Our first rule is to stick to one or two type sizes at the most.
If necessary, there are other devices such as bold, light, roman and italic to differentiate different parts of a text, but even there, stick to the minimum. Type weights can be used to great advantage when dedicated to a specific function, rather than be used for color purposes or even worse as a phonetic analogy.

…

Too much diversity creates fragmentation – a very common disease of badly designed communication. Too much identity generates perceptive redundancy and lack of retention.

etc….

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

How to design like Massimo Vignelli