U of Nebraska Press in the 2010 AAUP Book, Jacket and Journal Show

Judging for the 2010 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show took place January 28-29 at the AAUP Central Office in New York City. Approximately 281 books, 286 jacket and cover design entries, and 8 journals were entered. From this pool of excellent design, the jurors chose 56 books, 1 journal, and 40 jackets/covers as the very best examples.

Included in the show are four entries from the University of Nebraska Press:

	In the Scholarly Illustrated category: One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record by Candace S. Greene Designer: Roger Buchholz         Production Coordinator: Alison Rold Acquiring Editor: Gary Dunham Project Editor: Joeth Zucco
	In the Trade Typographic category: How to Cook a Tapir: A Memoir of Belize by Joan Fry Designer: Ashley Muehlbauer     Production Coordinator: Alison Rold Acquiring Editor: Heather Lundine  Project Editor: Ann Baker
	In the Reference category: Jim Harrison: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1964 - 2008 by Gregg Orr and Beef Torrey Designer: Ray Boeche                     Production Coordinator: Alison Rold Acquiring Editor: Ladette Randolph Project Editor: Joeth Zucco
	In the Jackets/Covers category: Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story by José Torres Designer: Ashley Muehlbauer   Production Coordinator: Carolyn Einspahr

Judging a Book by Its Cover: Columbine

...by Henry Sene Yee Design: Columbine

Designer Henry Sene Yee blogs about designing the cover for Columbine (recently reviewed by Beth).

I thought that like 9/11, this was a regular day in the life of a regular high school. I wanted to depict the banality of school life . . .

The Book Cover Archive

Are you a fan of great book covers? Yes? Then I recommend you head right over to The Book Cover Archive: An Archive of Book Cover Designs and Designers. You can browse by designer, title, author, art director, photographer, illustrator, genre, publication date, or publisher. What more could you want? What's that? A blog, you say, to go along with the archive? Here you go: the Book Cover Archive Blog.

I love this book cover: The Lie Detectors

The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession
by Ken Alder

University of Nebraska Press designer Joel Gehringer kindly agreed to share some thoughts on designing this cover:

Is there anything in particular you'd like to share about this design?

I have to give a lot of credit to the editors on the design for "The Lie Detectors." After we had tried a number of different concepts, they decided they wanted something evoking the Dick Tracy-esque, pop-art feel of the 1950s, and the paranoia of the era, which plays a big role in the lie detector's history. In that sense, they started me down the path for this one.

Where did you find the images you used?

I went searching for something I thought would fit these concepts and came along some great art at one of our photo services. The artist had a number of fairly basic comic book panels that weren't too exciting on their own - expressions, detectives, cars, faces, that kind of stuff.

How did you arrive at the decision to crop them the way you did?

I realized that with the right framing I could make those images a little more dramatic and get at that nervous paranoia. I think the idea that you can't see the whole face of the man at the top forces the imagination to churn a bit (I added the lie detector devices on the fingers, so now I tend to imagine he's getting nervous because of some tough questions). On the bottom, I cropped a fairly plain image of a smiling detective with a magnifying glass to make him into a more ominous, dangerous-looking figure, maybe an interrogator of some sort. The angles just add to the uneveness, making it less orderly and thus more dramatic.

Penguin's Show of Talent

Penguin and Sam Taylor, author of The Amnesiac, kindly offered up Taylor's upcoming novel The Island at the End of the World as the foundation of our competition. Designers, illustrators, painters and photographers contributed more than 300 ideas for the cover design of Taylor's new book, and a jury comprised of Penguin editor Alexis Washam, creative director Paul Buckley and Creativity editors selected the 25 finalists presented here.

Head on over here to see the 25 finalists and here for the winner.

via

Magazine Page Design Video

From magCulture.com

Matt Willey recently recorded his decision-making on a feature design for the Royal Academy magazine. It provides a very useful insight into how page designs get arrived at, one that anyone who’s ever designed a magazine will recognise.

I finished The Learners by Chip Kidd

I didn't know anything about this when I picked it up. It sucked me right in, though. I thought it was interesting and original and very funny. Here is a review of it from the New York Times.

From the jacket:

Fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy lands his first job as a graphic designer (okay, art assistant) at a small Connecticut advertising agency populated by a cast of endearing eccentrics. Life for Happy seems to be—well, happy. But when he's assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department, Happy can't resist responding to the ad himself. Little does he know that the experience will devastate him, forcing a reexamination of his past, his soul, and the nature of human cruelty—chiefly, his own.

Here is a video showing off some of the design features of The Learners

Penguin Design Award

See the 2008 Design Award Winners here.

The first Penguin paperbacks appeared in the summer of 1935 revolutionising the publishing industry and becoming an integral part of British culture and design history. The development of Penguin covers runs parallel to the emergence of graphic design as a profession and, under a long line of talented and creative designers, the design of Penguin books has evolved and progressed.

There's also a good post with more information at The Penguin Blog.

Thirty Tables of Contents

The Design Observer's Thirty Tables of Contents, including one by UNP (Ronell's Telephone Book, designed by Richard Eckersley):

With this in mind, we offer this book, compiled on the occasion of AIGA’s Twelfth Biennial National Design Conference in Denver last year. In it, we have choosen to narrow our sights to the written word, considering what we read next, how we move from one chapter to the next, and how we navigate through a single volume. Often overlooked by serious bibliophiles, the humble TOC is our portal into a world of knowledge. In the realm of the printed word, it heralds what comes next, a verbal proscenium with its own peculiar prose and typographic conventions.

In this book, we have gathered together thirty Table of Contents pages from our personal collections. On the surface, the selection may elude standard organizational conceits: why a design collection that also includes poetry and fiction? Why Philip Larkin and not Billy Collins, Ayn Rand and not Philip Roth, Paul Rand and not Jan Tschichold? Like “next” itself, there’s no intentional logic or over-arching plan: we just found these examples engaging, the discrepancies between them even more so.

For more of Richard's work, check out richardeckersley.com, a site created by Sam Eckersley (Richard's son).

Judging a book by its cover

This is one of my all-time favorite book covers (technically it's the front cover of a jacket). I'm not sure exactly what it is about it that makes me so drawn to it. The first time UNP designer Annie Shahan showed it to me I said that I would buy that book for the jacket alone. I love the colors, the image, and especially the way she handled the type.

In the Shadow of Memory
by Floyd Skloot
University of Nebraska Press

In December 1988 Floyd Skloot was stricken by a virus that targeted his brain, leaving him totally disabled and utterly changed. In the Shadow of Memory is an intimate picture of what it is like to find oneself possessed of a ravaged memory and unstable balance and confronted by wholesale changes in both cognitive and emotional powers. Skloot also explores the gradual reassembling of himself, putting together his scattered memories, rediscovering the meaning of childhood and family history, and learning a new way to be at home in the world. Combining the author’s skills as a poet and novelist, this book finds humor, meaning, and hope in the story of a fragmented life made whole by love and the courage to thrive.

Keming

A new typographic term meaning the result of improper kerning.
from Ironic Sans via Boing Boing