Our book design blog has been fairly quiet this year. 10 posts all year. That’s not much blogging. The lack of blogging isn’t from a lack of things to say, simply a lack of time with all the books that we’ve been designing. Despite the global economic crisis, the freelance book design business is healthy. Now, it’s time to make an effort to catch up on the blogging. And along the way perhaps we’ll get a chance to update our online portfolio, which is woefully out-of-date.

Stay tuned for more posts. I’ll be making brief posts about many of our current and recent projects while Ceci will offer more in-depth posts examining specific design aspects.

This blog has been silent for a while but we’ve been very busy here at sorodesign with a lot of exciting projects. With spring beginning here in Buenos Aires and fall arriving in North America, we’re going to return to blogging more often. Look forward to a lot of new posts about book design, plus we’ll be talking about several of the projects we’ve completed over the last few months.

Also, we’ve just recently completed a redesign of our own web site sorodesign. com and expanded our portfolio. We redesign the site every year, so this is our 3rd redesign. If you’ve not visited us lately, then click over and wander around.

We were recently notified by someone that about a dozen of our book cover designs were being used by a book cover design firm in India. That was surprising news to us. I quickly contacted the company in India and demanded an explanation.

The Indian company promptly responded that the designs were provided to them by one of their designers. The manager of the company apologized, removed our book cover designs from their portfolio, and stated that the designer would be “punished”. Considering their quick response to this matter and their explanation I’ve decided not to link to that company or print their name in this post. Should I?

An odd aspect to this situation is that the firm didn’t include the stolen designs directly in their online portfolio but only in an e-mail to potential clients and labeled the designs as their extended portfolio. So, if someone had not notified us by e-mail then we would have never learned about this incident. I’m trying to have good faith in believing that the Indian firm actually did remove the cover designs and not just changed the location to a URL I do not know about.

Ultimately, it’s quite foolish for a designer to use another designer’s portfolio. What happens when the design thief cannot deliver the same quality of designs as presented in the portfolio?

It’s very common for book cover designers to be influenced by the covers of other designers. It’s something else to blatantly use another’s portfolio as one’s own.

sorodesign recently completed the Web site for Argentine illustrator Alejandro Firszt. The design reflects Ale’s desire for a clean, minimalist layout.

Authors and publishers interested in contracting with an illustrator should take a moment to examine Ale’s portfolio. He is an exceptional illustrator. Here are a couple of examples of his works: