We Made This

Great Ideas, Volume III

  

Well heck, it's that time of year again, and the third volume of Penguin's Great Ideas Series is about to hit the shelves (early August we're reliably informed). Once again, the bulk of the designs are by the marvellously talented David Pearson, including the magnificent The Sickness unto Death cover (above); with additional covers by Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon. Our very own Alistair Hall also got in on the act with a cover for The Evils of Revolution by Edmund Burke (below).  

  

  

You can see the complete volume on this Flickr set, and check out David Pearson's site for Volume I and Volume II. We think they're all looking great, but if we had to choose, our personal favourite is Pearson's cover for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which takes the design from the spine and simply repeats it on the front cover (below).  

  

Genius.  

Books, books, glorious books

 
It's always felt a bit like book cover design sits toward the back of the class when it comes to the attention it gets from the design industry. But recently books have been stepping back into the limelight, thanks to a few really stunning bits of design, such as this science fiction series from Gollancz. The weighty tome Fully Booked from Gestalten taps into this revived interest in book design. 
  
Edited by Robert Klanten and Matthias Hübner, the book is divided into two sections, one dealing with book covers (and we get to show off here, as it includes the Great Ideas series we contributed to), the other with artists' books. The two sections start at either end of the book, so you have to turn it upside down to switch from one section to the other. Ironically, we're not totally convinced by this bit of design (we keep opening the wrong section of the book), but the contents are really wonderful (if a bit light on background information), and provide a great showcase of where book design is at right now. 

Lovely.

Print Liberation

A rather lovely thing about running a blog is that people from all over the place get in touch out of the blue to tell you about projects they're working on. And we reckon we've been pretty lucky so far, as nearly all the stuff that's been sent our way has been dead interesting.

One such project is the new book coming up from the Print Liberation studio in Philadelphia. It's a primer on how to start screen printing using really basic elements, and is written by Nick Paparone & Jamie Dillon from the studio, in collaboration with Luren Jenison, with illustrations by Tim Gough. It looks fantastic - we can't wait to get our hands on a copy.

Print Liberation is published on July 25, by F+W Publications, the kids behind How, ID and Print magazines.

Early Designs

Our friend Andy over at Now in Colour has set up an interesting project that kicks off today.

He's been asking the great and the good of the creative industry to post up their old college work, as part of what he calls a ‘raindrop idea’, where the individual contribution is small, but where it collectively has a noticeable effect. (A good example of this being done really well is the Blog Action Day that we took part in back in October.)

Alistair’s picked a couple of projects from his time at Central Saint Martins, where he studied on the BA Graphic Design course:

First up is Bob Book, a story about “the brief life and untimely death of an elastic band”. I put this together in my first year at St Martins, and it’s still one of my favourite projects. The typography is rubbish (14pt Arial? I didn't have a clue...), and the mix of photography and hand drawn images is peculiar, but it’s got real heart to it, and that just about carries it through. And I’m still quite proud of the binding, which is just a series of elastic bands stretched across two corrugated plastic boards. You can see the full book on this Flickr slideshow.

Next up is a series of pictures I took of Simon Pegg and Jessica Stephenson when they were writing the second series of the TV show Spaced. It was just a great way to spend a day. As a project it reminded me that there’s a real freedom you have at college to get in touch with people, and it’s hugely important to make the most of that.

You can see more work from other creative folk at the Early Designs Flickr group.

Uncredited

A great big thank-you to everyone who has added to our list of rather fine motion graphics - Alistair has been sellotaping all the suggested films into his collection of favourites on YouTube, so do take a look. If you know of any other bits of great typographic film, just sling the links our way.

And if that whets your appetite, you might want to take a look at the decidedly brilliant Uncredited book by Gemma Solana and Antonio Boneu.

A comprehensive collection of graphic design and opening titles in movies, it features a simply staggering amount of work from the greats of title design, and even has a disc with a stack of QuickTime movies of those titles (though it would have been fantastic if it had been a DVD instead).

Lovely stuff.

Bring on the Apocalypse

It's always exciting when a job comes into the studio that fits with something you're already interested in.

That happened recently for us when Atlantic Books dropped us a line asking if we'd be interested in doing the cover for George Monbiot's new book, Bring on the Apocalypse.

If you don't know him, Monbiot is a journalist, author, academic, and environmental and political activist. He writes a weekly column in the Guardian, and specialises in cutting to the chase when it comes to the big issues of our time, particularly climate change, while always backing his arguments up with fantastic attention to detail.

The new book is a collection of essays and articles loosely grouped into arguments about God, Nature, War, Power, Money and Culture. It sounds like pretty heavy stuff, so it's testament to Monbiot's talent as a writer that it is fascinating and exciting rather than just doom and gloom. (We particularly liked the essay "Is the Pope gay?")

Great stuff.

London Artists Book Fair

The London Artists Book Fair kicks off today at the ICA, and runs through until Sunday.

It's a great chance to get your hands on some really affordable art, shaped like a book. Here's a full list of exhibitors.

The image above is from Tom Phillips ongoing piece The Humument, a treated Victorian novel. Phillips will be in conversation with publisher Hansjorg Mayer on Saturday at 2.30pm - grab your tickets here.

Penguin Celebrations

The Penguin nostalgiafest rolls on, with the release of the Penguin Celebrations series:

Whether orange, blue, green, pink or purple, Penguin Celebrations give readers everywhere unique voices, enthralling stories and quite simply the best books of their kind to be published in recent years. What's not to celebrate?

Um. The name perhaps?

Still, the thirtysix books look lovely, published in six different series: "Light Blue for big ideas, Green for mystery, Orange for fantastic fiction, Pink for distant lands, Dark Blue for real lives and Purple for viewpoints"; all using an adaptation of the classic Jan Tschichold grid.

It does feel slightly odd to read contemporary literature dressed up in period costume though, and you get the feeling that these are books to be displayed and collected rather than read. Particularly as they're only doing one print run.

If you are going to read one of them though, we'd suggest picking up The Secret History by Donna Tart. It really is a classic.

You can pick them up from the Penguin site in a three-for-two offer.

Irma Boom, amazing book designer

We trundled over to the Royal Festival Hall last night to catch the D&AD lecture by the wonderful book designer Irma Boom.

She was introduced by Simon Waterfall, the new D&AD president, who seems like a charming chap, and who described his guest speaker as "mad as a box of snakes".

Irma kicked off the lecture by reading out a list of words that describe her work. She started with a lot of words that began with the letter A, and you could almost hear the collective thoughts of the audience as they realised where it was leading: "Hmm. A list or words beginning with 'A'. Oh! She's moved on to words beginning with 'B'. This could take a while, but probably she's just doing an ABC of book design. Oh... no... it is in fact the entire alphabet."

500 or so words later, it felt like it was going to be a long, long lecture.

But not a bit of it. Irma Boom is utterly fascinating, and her work is quite simply stunning. She used a sort of live-action overhead projector thing (a document camera), which meant that as she flipped through her books, we could see them on the projection screen.

She talked us through her career book by book, in great and fascinating detail, so much so that she ran out of time, despite being given an extra half hour. We would have happily listened for another hour.

Her book design seems to embody a sort of (at times literally) rough-edged sensuality, as well as a real sense of luxury, whether that be in her use of materials, or the sheer extent of her books - the book she created for Dutch conglomerate SHV ran to 2136 pages.

Check out more about her in the following links:

Design Museum: a good biography
Tyotheque: interview from Abitare, discussing the SHV book and the Otto Treumann monograph
Eye magazine: review of The Book as sculpture, created to commemorate her winning The Gutenburg Prize
Irmaboom.nl: her personal website, but currently under construction

(Image: SHV, courtesy of the Design Museum site.)

The other John Lewis

While we were digging around at the Ephemera Fair (see our previous post), we were lucky enough to find a copy of A Book of Typefaces, the wonderful type sample book produced in 1952 by printers W.S.Cowell Ltd; and designed by John Lewis.

Here's a bit from the introduction:

This type book is intended for those who either for their amusement, or in the course of their calling, deal in print. The amateur must be content with the fact that it is limited to the typefaces carried by this printing house. To the professional user that limitation is, of course, a necessity.

The introduction of coloured illustration, and other decorative matter may distress the typographic purist. Our reason for this is that many succeeding pages of type specimens can become confusing to the layman. Illustrations offer a relief and an appropriate illustration can often illuminate the qualities of a typeface.

At the other end of the book, there's a panel detailing how the book was produced:

This book has been printed throughout by letterpress on a two-sheet ivorex board made by Tullis Russell & Co. Ltd. It has been Spirax bound by James Burn and Co. Ltd. and cased by Cowells. The cover is printed by offset lithography on white book cloth from some seahorse designs drawn on Plastocowell [they're by Denis Wirth-Miller].

Apart from the specimen pages of typefaces, the text matter for prelims, etc., has been set in Plantin Series 110 and the captions on illustrated pages in Bodoni Series 135.

Because it was spiral bound, Cowell's could produce extra pages for the book at a later date, as and when they had new typefaces available. Readers filled in a card when they bought the book, and as the extra pages were produced, they were mailed out to them. The new pages could then just be slotted in to the binding - our copy has 12 of them.

John Lewis, the typographer and designer behind the book, was born in 1912, and studied at Goldsmiths, joining the printing works W.S.Cowell after the war, in 1946. He went on to teach at the Royal College of Art, where he founded the private press that ran there from 1953 to 1970. He also published the first real study of printed ephemera with the suitably titled Printed Ephemera in 1962.

He died in 1996 - you can read his full obituary from The Independent. His collection of ephemera is now held at Reading University, and includes 20,000 items, dating from the 15th Century to the present day.