Book Cover Inspirations

OK. These are some of the book covers that have caught my interest. A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby is a story about four people who all happen to go up to the same rooftop on New Year's Eve to commit suicide. They end up becoming a somewhat reluctant group of friends and support. The simple way the the text is displayed is effective. Just reducing the font size creates the effect of descent and goes along with the topic of the book perfectly.

Push by Sapphire is simple and illustrative as well. I had to read this for a class a few years ago. it is a very difficult book to read because of all the things the main character has to go through: rape, incest, violent abuse, illiteracy, childbirth, AIDS, etc. A simple font is used. The colors used communicate severity to my mind. The size of the font illustrates the pushing of the boundaries of the character's capacities and the author's graphic writing.

The other ones just really caught my attention, but I am not really able to explain why. I just really like them, especially Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451 and The Great Gatsby.

Inspiration

For Those About to Rock

This is a poster for a Battle of the bands in San Fransisco, or maybe San Diego...one of the Sans.

Circley!

I didn't know what to title the post. That's the best I could do today. I like how this was made to look like a Zodiac map. Pretty interesting.

Scrolly, Pretty

Also from Print magazine, I thought these examples were really nice. If I were to ever get my wife's name tattooed on my butt, it would look something like this.

Helvetica

This is the movie poster for the documentary film Helvetica. It was in the December 2008 issue of Print. I love the "cast" of characters at the top.

More Tattoos

I know we have covered the topic of type in tattoos, but I thought this was really interesting and deserved honorable mention. This is the cover photo for the October 2009 issue of Print. It's probably not real anyway. If it is real, this guy has to be the most dedicated contributor any publication has ever had.

h2no

This one is along the same lines as the pregnancy test example: something so very simple but so effecting. Four characters in the middle of a blank gray card communicate the message very clearly and humorously. It's a wonder that no other company thought of this in all the years that clothing manufacturers have been producing rain coats. Also from the February 2009 issue of HOW.

Pregnancy Test

I love it when I seen something so simple but so effective. There are absolutely no design elements to this, it is just presented in type but it communicates the message and the feeling that the consumer is experiencing with something so small as replacing the "P" with a "?".
February 2009 issue of HOW.

Book Covers

I thought the design of these book covers was really funny given the subject matter of the books. I thought is was clever to cover books about insults and pick-up lines with hard-back cloth bindings with foil embossed lettering. I got this from the April 2009 issue of HOW.

Lover of Fonts

Ok, well I do think that both of these are pretty neat. But I have to confess that I mostly just thought they were silly and that everyone would appreciate them. At the same time I am a little impressed with them. It must have taken some time and dedication to a sort of industry inside joke. From what I could find, the font used in the first piece is Compacta (EF).

Typographical artifact of the week

I just stumbled across this image and I thought it was awesome. It's amazing how well the designer is able to represent James Brown's face with lines of text. And it makes it even better that the lines of text are lyrics from his songs. The colors used represent his style of music. I was just really impressed.

Typography Nuggets: 2nd Edition

I really liked this piece. It's the same case in spoken language; someone might hear you speaking but not be listening to what you're saying. I like how this is communicated in the various type faces, placed one on top of the other, forming an indistinguishable, black mass. I also like the combination the the typewriter face with the clean-edged sans serif in white over the top of the blob of black ink.

Font Poster Copy

The font I chose is Lubalin Graph. This is the copy material I have come up with so far. I am open to suggestions.

Herb Lubalin, one of the co-founders of ITC designed this monotone typeface, a variation on his famous font Avante Garde with the addition slab serifs. The ITC Lubalin Graph font family has a large x-height that increases its readability. Avante Garde was originally developed in 1968 to serve as the signature typeface of the magazine by the same name. This modified version was published in 1974 by ITC. Herb Lubalin was one of the most influential and emulated typographers in America during his life, and continues as such posthumously. His unique manner of using type as illustration as well as copy was ground breaking and powerful.

Typography 1

The image I found is from the cover of a literary magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story. I gained an interest in these types of publications while studying English for the past 4 years . I was not able to figure out the name of the font being used here, but I love the simplicity of the design. There are no images; there are only the words and you have to interpret what you can from just the words and how they are presented. That's very appropriate, I think, given the material found within.