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 points on them. Very cool stuff!
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 a simpler more representative image. But then my skills as an illustrator are often challenged by sitting in the floor coloring with my two-year-old.
Thanks to BDR for spilling the beans on the winners (because I sure couldn’t find any updates online). Click through to see the runners-up and such, too.
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 is this one by Justin Walsh. The bleeding watercolor effect is almost too much, but I think the rest of it is executed wonderfully! It certainly stands out from the group.
The winner will be announced at a New York event on September 25th.
{via bdr}
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 get dry… and stale feeling… which is why I L-O-V-E cruising through Scamp, every so often.
It’s a blog staffed by professional illustrators over in Ireland. Some of it is weird. But some, like this post from Monday which chronicles the illustration of a book cover, are very cool. If you skim through that post you’ll see that even the pencilers use PS. Enjoy! Let me know if any of you know that free ghost filter he mentions…. I’m looking for it.
