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Category: design

June 25, 2009

Worser Book Cover Design of the Week: Vanilla Edition.

design, words

I don’t know if I’m just really uninspired this week or if there’s an exceptional amount of bland shit being churned out lately, but the covers of this weeks new releases are neither rocking me or bumming me out. As if I’m standing in a hot driveway, sweating, after just having jogged three miles and I’m waiting for the publishing world to come bring me a nitrogen-cold strawberry daiquiri they promised, but instead they show up and offer me a tepid glass of milk. Here’s a round-up of this weeks book covers that are totally devoid of harm, risk and fun. Wallow in the mediocrity! Wallow, I say!

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For the amature mortician and/or zombie enthusiast there’s Larry King’s new memoir. Might want to think twice about putting that mug on a book cover in order to sell books instead of inducing panic trips to the botox clinic.

Photographer: Larry, give us a big warm smile.

Larry King: I am smiling.

Photographer: No, that’s more of a Dick-Cheney-evil-genius-predator sneer you’ve got happening there. Think more “I’d like to share my life story with you” and less “I’d like to lure you to my dungeon and feast on your innards.”

Larry King: …

Photographer: Larry?

Larry King: …

Photographer: Jesus. Will somebody poke him with a stick or something?

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More like The Forgotten Use of Restraint Concerning Vine Embellishments and Sepia Filters.

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Sure, Allen was a living legend in the skin moisturizer advertising comunity, but designing a book cover would be a new challenge entirely.

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The man who owns this book…

a. leaves his television on the History Channel at all times.

b. owns an impressive collection of guns and cleans them regularly. While watching the History Channel.

c. prays for provocation.

d. secretly wears a sports bra he stole from The Finish Line in the mall.

e. All of the above.

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June 19, 2009

Better Book Cover Design of the Week.

FYI, art, design, words

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I was going to wait about a week to get to this, but I couldn’t wait.

Stephen Elliott’s been circulating pre-release copies of his new book, a true-crime memoir, as sort of a DIY marketing buzz generator. The gist is you email Stephen, ask him if you can read his book, convince him that you’re a real person, he mails you the book and you have a week to finish it, then you mail it to someone else. Sounds like a really cool idea, no? I thought so too, so I emailed him. He sent me the book and I’m reading it right now and I’m pretty blown away by it so far. But this isn’t a review of the contents inside the book.

(Disclaimer: This is kind of a soft edge image that’s supposed to be used for wheat pasting I think. It was the highest res image I could find. You get the idea. I’ll post a sharper one next week.)

The cover graphic for The Adderall Diaries has all the elements that make a stop-you-in-your-tracks image. Loss, abandonment and confusion are conveyed with a few colors, a few layers and a healthy dose of taste. What else do you need to know? Simple, beautiful, creative. Well done.

P.S. The project is still going on if you want to read the book. Click the link above or right here if you’re lazy. Highly recommended.

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June 11, 2009

Better Book Cover Design of the Week.

design, words

tycoon

Like most white people, I’ve got a bit of an obsession with turn-of-the-century design aesthetics. Not really sure what you would call that. Rockefellerphilia, perhaps? I’ve got a theory that this obsession stems from a desire to hearken back to a time when white folks thought they were pretty hot shit. All building factories and swirling brandy in oak lined rooms. Can we really blame them for the vast industrialization and domination of every business venture possible and all the irreversible ramifications that came with it? Yes, we can.

T. J. Stiles’s The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt tells the story of a Staten Island born, steamship building, Abraham Lincoln consulting, business modeling, fist fighting, gambling addicted son having, titan of industry.

Remaining true to the tone of the times, this cover implements the letterpress-style typfaces and embellishments that defined the era. And even goes the whole nine to include a daguerreotype-style image of the powdered wig captain of industry himself. A subtle head-nod to the design of the dollar bill and the pursuit of which he devoted his life to.

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June 4, 2009

Better Book Cover Design of the Week.

art, design

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After a couple weeks of dipping deeply into the nostalgia pool for BBCDW I figured it’d be a good idea to bring it back to now-times. But not too now-times.

David Carr’s mem-wuah The Night of the Gun chronicles the depths of his many, many years of substance abuse. Sounded like a pretty good book when it came out in hardcover about a year ago. But I didn’t buy it back then cause of a personal rule of mine that might get me into trouble with most book aficionados: I can’t stand hard cover books. They’re cumbersome, you can’t fold them back and hold them with one hand, they’re unecessarily heavy, and if you get upset or dissapointed with the contents therin and decide to whip the thing across the room in a little baby tantrum you’re more likely to break something valuable. Plus this one’s hardcover design left a lot to be desired. It kind of smacked of a little too much effort, “It looks like a gun but it also represents drugs. Get it? Get it?!” Yeah, yeah, we get it, we get it. You enjoying your first year at art school?

Something about contrast of the photos on the cover of paperback just struck me as a little more genuine and haunting. They kept the same hand-scrawled chalk font which was working well for them the first time around. And they even managed to tastefully work in a cover blurb by a insanely popular author, which, in my eyes, is often a no-no. Well done, nameless Simon & Schuster paperback designer.

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May 28, 2009

Better Book Cover Design of the Week.

art, design, words

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May 15th’s entry of BBCDW got me digging through all sorts of Flickr pools in search of the perfect cover. I’ve yet to find it, but in the meantime there’s some pretty stellar gems laying around.

Check out this paperback pool I found this morning that seems to be loosely centered around Penguin and Pelican releases from the 60’s and 70’s. Must’ve been nice to be around in a time when people were a little more artful in their decisions for reprints seeing as it’s mostly a snooze-fest now.

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May 20, 2009

KLUGE!

Orlando, art, design, holy shit

Remember that bad ass thing I was telling you about? Here’s the video me bro made for it.

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May 20, 2009

Worser Book Cover Design of the Week.

animals, design, words

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I could go into a whole didactic breakdown of why this is a bile-inducing book cover, but this shithead who’s responsible for decades of shitty music and even shittier people who follow his career religiously doesn’t even deserve that much. All he gets in terms of a critique is this: Given the choice, I’d rather barf up all the cheese burgers and margaritas that ever existed than read this book.

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May 18, 2009

Press.

Annalemma, Fun, Orlando, art, design
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Read More »

Comments (7)
May 15, 2009

Better Book Cover Design of the Week.

FYI, art, design, drawing, words

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Harper Collins wishes they had the balls to release a book cover like this.

Last week Keith Phipps of the AV Club posted this review of Theodor Sturgeon’s classic sci-fi novel More Than Human. Before you click through I will forecast your reaction: You will shake your head and whisper, “Damn, if sci-fi novels from back in the day didn’t have the tightest covers.”

So now I’m obsessed with these things. One google search and few clicks later and I unearthed a goldmine of the illest book covers ever drawn.

A few favorites:

Tales of the Cthulu Mythos

The Bull and the Spear

The Beast the Shouted Love at the Heart of the World

Those were the days. All it took to have the sickest job was to have some drawing and painting skills and a shitload of LSD.

After spending a good half an hour browsing these things, the book shelf at your local Borders will look about as stimulating as the pamphlet rack at the doctors office.

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May 7, 2009

Better Book Cover Design of the Week.

design, words

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Full disclosure: This weeks BBCDW entry comes more out of an interest in the material itself than an interest in the accompanying design, which, as will soon be explained, is not all that great.

I’ve been sitting at my desk all this week (plopped in front of my desk, really) contentedly chipping away at a new issue. Yesterday, though, something hit me all the sudden. Holy Shit. I’m a 27-year-old healthy young man. What the fuck am I doing whiling away my days at a fucking desk when I could be out breaking laws and jumping my motorcycle over gorges. Or at the very least, introducing myself to random women on the street and having long drawn out conversations about life and love, a la Before Sunrise. Taking some sort of risks, I guess, instead of being cautious and careful all the time.

That’s why William Gurstelle’s new book struck a chord with me. Living dangerously reminds you that you’re alive, not a worker drone  toiling away for dubious reasons. Kind of an idealistic, college kid notion, but the truth nonetheless.

The cover design, on the other hand, is nothing special. It aspires to greatness, something along the whimiscal lines of The Dangerous Book for Boys, but falls shamefully short. The little flamethrower man is an almost embareassing example of poor Adobe Illustrator skills and the knives in the lower left almost look like cooking cutlery, not anything truly menacing, like so. It appears they were going for the turn-of-the-century Almanac aesthetic but just ended up with a design hodge podge straight out of Stuff magazine. Hopefully they can get it together for the paperback. What’s that?  This is the paperback? Yikes.

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