Collectible Hardbacks

What are these? Why, they're beautiful clothbound editions of some of Penguin's finest works of fiction, naturally. I think they're just absolutely beautiful. As Alan Trotter puts it on his excellent design blog: "Either you want them, or else, I guess you hate things that are nice?"

All designed by the wonderful Coralie Bickford-Smith

These books are actually the second installment of hardback editions of Penguin's Classics. If you've got a big enough bank balance, you can also purchase the first set, which are designed in the same style, and are just as beautiful.

Peter Callesen

I've been an admirer of Peter Callesen's work for some time now. He creates each of these beautiful creations out of just one sheet of ordinary A4 paper, combined with a brilliant mind and bucket loads of patience.

Hola!

The Hello Project is an online social collaboration giving people the chance to say hi, hello, or hola on one of today’s most common yet neglected canvases: the Post-it®.

How it works is simple. Take a regular 3×3 Post-it® and write/sketch/doodle your version of hello. Scan it, email it to hi [at] thehelloproject.com, and they’ll post it for everyone to see.

THP is a relatively new site run by friends of The Donut and doodle extraordinaires Kristen Caston & Joseph Delhommer. Go check out the creative solutions so far and contribute – it only takes a second. It’s a great creative exercise to break the monotony of your everyday design stuff. I have a few submissions on there myself :)

Something Again

Part of an interview with Leah Hayes, and illustrator whom i rather like.



What I enjoy about your ballpoint illustrations is the incredibly distinct feeling and tone they have. What prompted you to use a ballpoint, and can you talk about the advantages and limitations?

I started to use a Bic pen because it is so much like a pencil—the line quality varies greatly, and you can get a super soft fine line, good for cross-hatching. I suspect too that I enjoyed drawing with a tool that is un-erasable. I did it again later with scratchboard. I think I like the recklessness—and stupidity, maybe—of doing something once and not being able to change it.

French Books

I have absolutely no idea what these books are all about, as they're all in French. All I do know is that they're great to look at. They've been designed by David Pearson, the clever man behind the Penguin Great Ideas series of books.

Penguin Great Ideas IV

For anybody not familiar with the Penguin Great Ideas series, it's a series which brings together some of the most influential texts ever made, from the minds of the worlds greatest thinkers; from Confucius and Plato, to Darwin, Rousseau, Woolf and Orwell, to name just a few. They're the kind of books that you would read in a public place if you wanted to try and make yourself look 'oh-so-sophisticated' in front of everybody else.

However, the books could be full of anything, complete nonsense even, I think I would still want to buy them, because of their incredible covers. The idea originally started out as one set of 20 books, and they used the colour red to tie the set together and create a visual consistency for the covers. The books were all printed using only two colours, red being the spot colour, and black being the only other they could use, printed on to white stock. It's always a challenge designing for print in just two colours, but the end results were fantastic. The different illustrations and use of type on the covers help each book to remain interesting and unique, whilst the two colour treatment really ties the books together to create a set that is visually stunning. The covers are a very tactile experience, they are printed on smooth matte paper, and feature heavy embossing. They're the kind of books you want to run your fingers over, and jpgs really don't do them much justice.

Four covers from Penguin Great Ideas Volume I

Due to the success of the first set of 20 books, Penguin decided to release another set, again featuring black and white covers, but this time using blue as the spot colour.

Penguin Great Ideas Volume II

As well as the covers, the spot colour is also used on the spines of the books, volume one all having red spines, volume two with blue ones, which means they look fantastic when they're lined up on your bookshelf. Moreover, the spines are numbered, which is brilliant from a marketing point of view, because once you've got a few, you're no longer content with just seeing the numbers 2, 3, 7, 15 and 20 on your bookshelf, you want to buy the rest so you can have the full numbers 1-20 staring back at you.

The numbered spines which are a book collectors dream come true

In September last year they released volume three, choosing to feature green as the spot colour. David Pearson, the man behind the Great Ideas series, comments on the choice of colour:

"Green’s not a selling colour. It’s much harder than finding the right red or blue. Most reds sit nicely against black or white; green doesn’t have that presence. [...] I was getting more confident as a designer, so the decisions were getting bolder. This series is more image-led – getting rid of some of the white and flooding the cover with information. Predominantly white covers (with the green) would be a bit vague."

(Creative Review, August 2008)

Penguin Great Ideas Vol III

Close up of Orwell's Books vs. Cigarettes cover

Green spines from Vol III

And now of course it's time for volume number four. Having already used red, blue and green, this time they've gone for purple, and what a great shade of purple it is. So far they've only revealed the first ten covers, out of 20 in the set, but I think they're possibly the best yet.

Penguin Great Ideas Vol IV

Talking about the latest set of books, Pearson says:

"The formula is now so familiar to us that the main struggle is really an internal one and that’s for us to move the series somewhere new each time. Across this many titles each cover has to be distinct enough to maintain interest and – I hope – the boundaries we originally set ourselves have allowed enough flexibility to do this. There will always be a part of me that feels slightly sheepish at having produced so many of these things (80 so far) but much more so, I feel incredibly lucky to be working on a project that taps into the very specific skills I do have (and not the myriad that I do not)."

(Book Cover Archive, August 13th 2009)


Personally, I believe this cover would have to be my favourite out of the whole lot:


David Pearson has also announced that there will indeed be a fifth, and final, set, scheduled for release in 2010 to coincide with Penguin's 75th birthday. I cannot wait to see what colour they choose next.

For more information, and to view the full set, check out the ever wonderful Book Cover Archive.

I Like Classical Music, Therefore I Hate Good Design

As far as I can tell, every classical music album comes with terrible packaging design as standard. A mix of horrendous typography, accompanied by generic photographs of instruments, composers, or in the worst cases, both. These are some of the most amazing, most celebrated pieces of music ever made, so why don't they deserve good design?

Four equally dire Mozart covers

Don't even get me started on the many problems I have with this album cover:

Mozart for your baby. Indeed.

Perhaps it's simply that the record companies want to keep the album art 'refined' and 'sophisticated' in order to differentiate it from the other music found on the shelves of record shops, or increasingly on the pages of internet shops like Amazon. Just glancing at the covers, you can instantly tell that these are classical albums; they're certainly not rock, dance, pop music, or anything else. However, album covers that are trying to look too sophisticated and pretentious run the risk of deterring new listeners. I don't know anybody my own age would even consider buying a classical album, yet I'm willing to bet that it's not because of the music itself, it's because the packaging makes it look like you're only supposed to purchase it if you're past retirement age.

Four Chopin album covers

Classical compilation albums are no better in terms of design

Upon seeing all these vexatious examples of bad design, I soon found myself eagerly trying to search out some examples of good classical album covers. I found a very interesting Flickr set full of classical music albums, all on vinyl, from the 1950s. The covers are full of bold colours and shapes, and some delightful illustrations which really sum up the style of design at the time. It's very far removed from the kind of illustrations we are used to seeing on album covers today.

Vinyl covers from the 50s

So if classical albums came with good design in the 50s, at what point did it all start to go wrong? I took Gustav Holst's 'The Planets' as an example, and started looking at how the album covers have changed over the last half a century.

1950s

1960s

1970s

1990s

2000s

In my opinion the 50s is still the best example, but the one that intrigues me the most is the one from the 70s. Even if it's not a great album cover, it's great to see at least one example that steers clear of the all too obvious pictures of planets, and instead tries to approach the subject of outer-space and otherworldliness from a different angle.

Finally, I did manage to find one example of a classical music album that I thought had a great design. Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), part of Wagner's opera, which culminates with the apocalyptical ending of the earth by raging fires and then floods, which wipe out both human civilization and the Gods. It would have been all too easy for the designer to simply place a picture of fire, destruction, Gods, or similar imagery on the front, but instead they went for a clean layout with a good visual hierarchy, a clever image, and some good typography to match (the only negative aspect is the record company's insistence on putting their logo in the corner). I'd like to see more covers like this, and fewer pictures of dusty old composers and their violins.

Die Götterdämmerung

For further examples of good, bad, and some slightly ridiculous classical album art, see these articles on the allmusic blog and the Too Many Tristans blog.