This morning I discovered Ace Jet 170, a really great blog on type and print by an English designer working in Belfast. We definitely will be going back and reading this one closely.
I came across Ace Jet 170 via a posting at nigelbeale.com about Canadian book designer C.S. Richardson and Penguin designer David Pearson. Be sure to check out all the links in that post. It’s another blog worthy of close attention. It has a lot of podcasts about books.
The Ephemerist has a nice posting of book cover art done by cartoonists as part of the Penguin Deluxe Series: “Not only do these covers immediately jump out as different than all the other book covers you see on the shelves, the cartoonists never even tried to shy away from their trademark style.”
That same posting also has a link to a very innovative cover of Voltaire’s Candide by cartoonist Chris Ware .
I’ve not yet had a chance to read or even see a copy of The Road by Cormac McCarthy but Samuel John Klein provides a review and some good insights into the book’s design, particularly the typography and interior layout. (Everybody talks about cover art so it’s good to see someone mentioning the interior, too).
The book’s type, cited by The Believer magazine as Bulmer, is an unadorned serif face, somewhat like Bodoni, whose plainness and matter-of-factness stands above its artistry. The folios–book title at the top of the verso, page number at the top of the recto–look like a downmarket variety of Koch’s Neuland; hand done but cut rather sloppily. Designer Peter Anderson has designed to the subject matter, and has done so superbly; the rigidly-obeyed margins and the generous leading enhance and reinforce the author’s prose style.
Read the review and about the Chip Kidd cover art at ZehnKatzen Times.
Thanks to Fade Theory we’ve come across a very interesting blog devoted to Arabic typography by Lebanese type designer Nadine Chahine who is now working at Linotype as the Arabic specialist. Her blog has a good series of postings on Arabic newspaper design.
And if you’ve not yet delved into Fade Theory then take a look.
While maintaining a cohesive style across this series, we wanted to create three covers that each utilized a different aspect that is central to the writings of Borges: time, tigers, mirrors.
