Yet another edition of Cover Revisionist History, a designer has redesigned the Harry Potter books as Penguin Classics editions. I have a confession to make: I have not read the Harry Potter books (but I have seen almost all the movies, if that counts). But from what I remember, the images chosen for the covers are iconic enough to work. What’s really fun is that the designer says”Due to multiple requests I am making these images available as prints”. So that’s cool. I wish more of what I find when trolling the interwebs could be mounted on my wall.
Here’s a neat little time killer. JudgeBy.com displays cover images from Amazon and you have to guess what their 5-star rating is. I played for 20 covers and never got one right. I think it’d be more fun to play with just fiction covers or some sub-set, because once you get to a cover like
You really just can’t tell if all of the home schooling folks’ reviews were good or bad about this book. In reality, there isn’t much of a relation between “best-seller” and “good cover design”. You just have to look at the Best Sellers Lists in all the papers to see that, which is a shame. But this is a fun little time water built on the Amazon API though. Can you pick a best-seller simply by looking at the cover?
The folks over at GalleyCat posted a link to mediabistro’s design blog unbeige which featured a year-end wrap up of Chip Kidd highlights. If you’re interested in bookcover design, Kidd news is always colorful and insightful.
I especially liked this article in The Telegraph, but only in the celeb-news junkie kinda way. Not sure why it’s important that I know what Kidd has over his sofa, but I enjoyed the piece none-the-less. Sort of a pop-ish look, at the man that puts out some of the best book covers, on the planet.
Also, here is a link to the USA Today page which is posting the serialized version of Kidd’s sophomore novel effort The Lerners.
Ok, enough with the love-fest…
with Bookslut.
Penguin’s new graphical covers for their classics series is great and gets this week’s “Thumbs Up”.
Books, Publishing and Birmingham
