Category: graphic designPage 2 of 3

What are the components of a well-made book?

Over at India, Ink., the redoubtable India is thinking about “what materials and processes and vendors to use to make books that will last a hundred years.” I…

Better Flickr search

Compfight (don’t ask me to explain the name) is my new favorite Flickr search site. It’s extremely fast, returns a lot of results, and can be set to…

Five centuries of board games

Every so often Mr. Peacay of BibliOdyssey exceeds even his high standards, and then one just has to call attention once again to his excellent site. BibliOdyssey is…

Ubu Roi, book binding by Marcel Duchamp and Mary Reynolds

Mary Reynolds (1891-1950) was an innovative book binder who for three decades enjoyed a relationship with Marcel Duchamp described by friends as “happier than most marriages.” Susan Glover…

The Island at the End of the World

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…

Two covers, one image

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…

American and European dust jackets, 1926-1947

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…

Illustrating Lennon

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…

Graphic design fads and Olympics posters

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

How have new technologies affected book design and typography?

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…

Market testing book covers

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…

Op ads

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…

Adjusting map color

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…

On the making of maps

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…

Book design fees

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,…

So adult it smarts

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…

Creative barcodes from Japan

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…

Sad Young Lit Guys

Nice conceptual book cover, via Book Design Review. Literary aspirations can be a heavy burden indeed. .

Vocabularium rerum

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)…

Words fail …

via Hoefler & Frere-Jones

Book cover design: On Fishing

On Fishing is a good example of a mostly typographic cover that is distinctive, noticeable, and instantly conveys a sense of the book. The graceful loops of the…

Trajan, the movie font

I don’t know why the Hollywood folks are so in love with Trajan, but it’s been a designer’s joke for years now — any Hollywood epic MUST use…

My Photoshop default workflow

I process most images that I post to the web in Photoshop, and I have a simple workflow that does what I want with a minimum of fuss….

Vector Magic

VectorMagic is an “online tool for precision vectorization.” In other words, it is an autotracer that converts pixel-based images (photos, screen captures, etc.) to vectors, which can then…