PBS has a great new documentary-short series out with the latest installments focusing on a handful of book artists. This video is under six minutes long. The film starts with a paper engineer who has helped make some of the world’s best pop-up books as well as a paper sculptor (timecode 2:08) who cuts books and [...]

It’s always interesting hearing boko designers talk about their projects. Even better when it’s Chip Kidd. Here he is  discussing text and cover design for Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.

There is a TON of information online about books and the ever-shifting landscape of publishing. It just takes so long to sift through everything to find something of worth, that you could actually use. But there are four conversations I always check in on, via Twitter. Sometimes I look back through the conversations, days after [...]

I recently ran across this video of Chip Kidd and James Ellroy. Though the video centers mostly on James Ellroy’s style and writing (he is one intense dude, no doubt) there are some spots where they discuss how the writing influences Kidd’s approach to designing a cover for the same author over and over. (Sidenote: [...]

The folks over at the Abebooks blog have published their picks for 30 Books Worth Buying For the Cover Alone. Only seven of the 30 use photographs. So illustration seems to be the way to go if you want to get noticed in the cover design crowd (of course, these are all fiction titles). I [...]

The Book Design Review Blog has a good post on Chip Kidd’s Bat-Manga!, which features Batman as he’s been portrayed in Japan since the 60′s. The post also has videos as well as shots of the covers. I don’t speak Japanese, but I love the way that the characters in the Bat-symbol have the cowl [...]

Matt Taylor won the Penguin cover design competition we mentioned last week, for Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World. Congratulations to him! It is, no doubt, one of the cleanest and well executed designs submitted, with some very complex imagery… It’s almost too much. The synopsis just seemed to call for [...]

Penguin has shared the top 25 designs (out of 300+ submissions) for Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World. To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect when I clicked through, but these are some GREAT designs. Though I liked #6 & #7 (I’m a sucker for die cut), my favorite [...]

Out of the 50+ book covers I was in on last year, only one required the hire of a real-life pencil smudging sketch artist. In these days, everything is done super-quick with a dash of Illustrator, a big stir with PhotoShop (sprinkled with some stock pics) and baked up in InDesign. All that techno-solutions can [...]

BookPatrol mentioned a cool archive this weekend that features 100 Years of Alphabet Books. I wish I had all the time in the world to go through and look at these. Some of the lettering is worthy of framing. Over on BibliOdyssey, this weekend,  a collection of over-the-top “holy smokes how long did it take [...]