More Book Covers

The aptly named Book Cover Archive is a great place to look for inspiration. the archive includes over 1,100 contemporary book covers, which you can search for by author, title, designer, publisher, and even typeface (there are a whopping 66 covers which feature Futura, but only 2 that use Frutiger). Fine examples include this innovative series of A4 paper-based designs by Sanda Zahirovic, Jenny Grigg's covers for Peter Carey, or the consistently excellent Jonathan Gray.
Back on the vintage-theme, but also well worthy of attention is this collection of 30 Polish book covers featured

on A Journey Round My Skull, and while I'm at it, there's a feature on some excellent Dick Bruna Covers (he's not just for rabbits, y'know) on Grain Edit.

Penguin Books in Series

I won't attempt to add to the reams and reams already been written about the design of Penguin Books, from the systematic approach defined by Jan Tischold during his brief stint in charge of typography and production, to the distinctive design of books in a particular series, such as these examples of popular fiction, science, crime, and science-fiction from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Its the consistency of the design within each series that appeals to me as much as the styles involved. For example the restricted green and black colour palet and simple-but-striking, Saul Bass-like illustration of the crime series. There are numerous archives of Penguin covers online, but particularly worth a look are the Pelican Project by Things Magazine, which organises the covers by decade, and Joe Kral's personal collection.

Chip Kidd & The Cheese Monkeys

This week I've been reading The Cheese Monkeys, debut novel by all-American book jacket designer Chip Kidd. The novel presents the semi-autobiographical tale of the beginning of Chip's college life, and his transformation from naive comic-book-enthusiast to graphic-design-wunderkind comic-book-enthusiast. It includes some sharp, and very funny, observations on the creative process and the college environment:

"On the first day of class, the Visual Arts building reclined before me like an old brick whore, egging me on to show her one, last, good time."

Also featured are Himillsy Dodd, a kind of super-cynical art chick who sounds great on paper but would most likely be intolerable in real life, and "shock-prof" Winter Sorbeck, the sociopathic tutor with whom our hero falls in love. Sorbeck is described as looking like Gary Cooper, circa High Noon. Here is an image of Gary Cooper, and one of Chip below it:

...see what he's done there?

Through his work at Knopf, Chip has become extremely well know, and although John Updike (for whom Chip has designed several jackets) once called his designs "monstrously ugly", he remains widely respected. Some of the designs are a bit ugly, and he can be a bit mannered in his use of imagery (enough with the circa-1950s comic books!) but there's a conceptual nugget at the heart of most of the designs that makes them successful nevertheless. There are a couple of good interviews with Chip in Seeing & Writing 3, and Identity Theory, and here are images of some of the jackets that made him famous:

Spin: branding the LOGO book

Patrick Eley and Ian Macfarlane of Spin gave a talk last week on some of their recent studio projects, including work for West-end gallery Haunch of Venison, and new self-initiated publishing project Unit Editions. The project that particularly stood out for me though was their design of Michael Evamy's book on logo branding for publisher Laurence King. Their approach was to reflect the content of the book by creating a brand identity for it. Early ideas included a cover spread of small reproductions of featured logos, much like the that which appears inside the dust jacket of the finished design, and a more detailed logo derived from the title of the book, which was rejected for looking too plausible and generic.
Black and white reproduction throughout most of the book, enables the reader to concentrate upon differences in form without the distraction of brightly-coloured logos leaping off the page. The use of a tight grid complements a navigational system that allows the 1,300+ logos to be divided into 75 categories without appearing cluttered or fussy. And the logo chosen for the title itself performs extremly well - the blacked-out shapes suggest an interchangeable identity, which represents potentially all and yet none of those contained within, and a black dot performing as a stand-in for the trademark symbol, itself a logo indicating the legality of brand ownership.