Photography and design for print production
Book design in all its forms, from jackets and hardcover books to trade paperbacks, mass-market paperbacks (although rarely), and academic journals.
Once again, it’s time for the annual 50 Books, 50 Covers awards!
My favorites: Blackness at MoMA, Specimen Days, 14 books by Gustavo Piqueira • 2012-2018), Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, and … not all of them, certainly. Interesting and challenging. Definitely worth checking out!
Type designers love a good pangram. Pangrams, of course, are sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once, of which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is surely the most famous. […] I find them singularly useless in type design, and I don’t use them in my work.
Find out what does work over at Hoefler&Co. with another fantastic post on type design.
Washington Square News discusses NYU’s attempts to — like pretty much everything else — get book design online:
The studio course focuses on book art and teaches students about the production of books, from interior and exterior design to binding techniques. Without the physical studio space and the materials it provides, digital learning has paved an unprecedented pathway for the course to continue.
Five typography-adjacent books for indoor times, from Johnathan Hoefler:
All five share a sincerity, an attention to detail, and a sense of humor that has kept me smiling for weeks.
With nearly 1,500 objects and 9,000 hi-fi images, Letterform Archive offers unprecedented virtual access to our collection.
—Online Archive
Way back in the day — that is, before the mid-nineties — publishing on the Mac consisted of Quark XPress. Okay, sure, there was Aldus Publisher and some bit players, but it was basically Quark or nothing. I used Quark in book design back then, and … basically hated it.
I was one of the early adopters of InDesign, dragging co-workers and companies along with me, as part of my time working at Tropicana. Not the juice cartons themselves — those were done in Illustrator — but the ancillary stuff, like marketing materials, sell sheets, and so on.
AppleInsider ran a piece a while ago (I’d missed it, initially), “How Adobe InDesign took over publishing with Steve Jobs’ help.” Good history for those of you who don’t know about those days or want a trip down memory lane, best summarized, in fact, by a commenter on the article: “This covers an interesting arc. Adobe went from an ambitious upstart trying to unseat an established, albeit arrogant, standard, to becoming the arrogant standard.”
From DesignWeek, a great story on AIGA’s 50 Books | 50 Covers.
From Vox:
“Publishing spent the 2010s fighting tooth and nail against ebooks. There were unintended consequences.”
Fascinating look at the how’s and why’s of traditional books vs. ebooks. (Needless to say, I’m firmly on the side of the traditional printed version.)
“The Book Concierge is NPR’s annual, interactive, year-end reading guide. Mix and match tags such as Book Club Ideas, Biography & Memoir, or Ladies First to filter results and find the book that’s perfect for you or someone you love.”
“Emily Mahon has been Art Director at Doubleday Books since 2006, and has also done freelance work for a wide range of publishing clients, including St. Martin’s Press, HarperCollins, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt and Company, Alfred A, Knopf, Little, Brown and Company, Simon & Schuster, among others.
I asked Mahon about her approach to book cover design, the design process, working with outside artists, and updating classics like Frankenstein.“
Interesting interview with an accomplished book designer and art director, courtesy of Forbes Magazine.