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Category Archive: inspiration
Today I am LOVING these prints by Tom Davie. Each features a quote from Alice in Wonderland.
You can see the full set here.
Movie poster design in general needs to solve two problems: catch the eye and communicate something about the film that the passerby will find compelling.
Here are two completely different takes on a movie poster… and I love them both. First, the poster for Disney’s upcoming animated Winnie the Pooh film. You know your characters are iconic when you don’t need to put anything on the poster but a wonderful illustration and the film’s release date.
And these two posters for the upcoming film Super are, well, super, in my opinion. I love that they look so completely hand made. I love the sense of humour. And let’s face it, you’re not going to miss them when you’re walking down the street. Something about those masks and the speech bubbles just draw you right in.
Personally I like the green one because, you know, Ellen Page – yay Canada!
Enough of this “When X happens, I’ll be ready to Y” kind of thinking.
The truth is,
image via Frank Chimero.
Happy New Year! Hope you and yours had a lovely holiday. Mine was hectic (we live on the West coast, our families live on the East coast, and we had a trip to DisneyWorld thrown in before Christmas). But as always, delightful to spend time with friends and family.
This year, I got a couple of gifts that we just so “me” that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The first was a set of Penguin postcards from my three nephews. Imagine, 100 Penguin book covers in postcard form… heaven!
You’ll find everything from The Great Gatsby to There Must be a Pony!
According to the little write up on the cover of the box, Penguin encourages you to judge a book by its cover:
In 1935 Allen Lane stood on a platform at Exeter railway station, looking for a good book for the journey to London. His disappointment at the poor range of paperbacks on offer led him to found Penguin Books. The quality paperback had arrived.
Declaring that ‘good design is no more expensive than bad,’ Lane was adamant that his Penguin paperbacks should cost no more than a pack of cigarettes, but that they should always look distinctive.
Ever since then, from their original — and now world-famous — look featuring three bold horizontal stripes, through many different stylish, inventive and iconic cover designs, Penguin’s paperback jackets have been a constantly evolving part of Britain’s culture. And whether they’re for classics, crime or prize-winning novels, they still follow Allen Lane’s original design mantra.
I plan to choose my favourites and frame them for my office. The rest shall be sent out to family, friends and clients to help spread great design!
As The Huffington Post’s Anis Shivani says
Book cover design is an underappreciated art form, yet it can help make a book. What goes into the thought process, and how do authors, designers, publishers, and marketing people collaborate? What degree of author input is generally solicited, and how do inchoate thoughts get translated into striking covers?
Luckily for us, The HuffPost took a look at 21 book covers and asked designer, authors and editors for some insight into the design process.
For example, this cover for Bernhard Schlink’s The Weekend features a shot of Barbara de Wilde’s (the designer) husband’s overnight bag.
The Weekend is the story of an untraditional reunion of friends after twenty-plus years of separation due to one character’s imprisonment for terrorism and murder as a member of Baader-Meinhoff. It is the first weekend of his release and the gathering inspires a confrontation of passions, loyalties, and ideals, and the question of his return to the movement. For the design I photographed my husband’s overnight bag, and placed the title inside. The significance of a piece of luggage without an owner has been burned into our consciousness in this current age of terrorism: is it a harmless bag or does it have a bomb inside? I probably would have preferred to leave the design with that bit of ambiguity, but the author wanted to see the bomb — so, I added it to the back.
See all the covers and the designers’ comments here.
Summer just will not get itself to my part of the world. We are not experiencing June; we are experiencing Jun-uary. Blech. Cloudy skies. Rain. Cool temperatures.
Since the weather isn’t putting me in a summer frame of mind, I’ve chosen to turn to the runways for a little seasonal inspiration. Here are some of the looks that caught my eye from the recent resort collections.
Bottega Veneta (when I win the lottery, I am dressing exclusively in this line — Thomas Maier is a genius)
Rachel Roy
Jason Wu (I pretty much never met a stripe I didn’t like)
Carolina Herrera
Michael Kors
Yigal Azrouel
Stella McCartney
Lela Rose (see? stripes!)
Derek Lam
All images from Style.com.