The Book Cover Archive is a compendium of the best of cover design, organized in some really useful ways. It’s the work of designers Ben Pierratt and Eric Jacobsen, and they’ve clearly put a lot of thought into the project. Not only can you search by authors, illustrators, and publishers, but also by designers, who are often the unsung heroes of a book’s success. (Don’t let anyone ever tell you people don’t judge a book by it’s cover.)
As an author, I am extremely interested in the idea of e-books and their impact on the future of publishing. Mandy Brown, a writer and designer, takes an interesting perspective on the issue: as long as we’re calling it an e-book, we’re kind of missing the point.
It’s a short, but very insightful essay on the history and future of the book as we know it.
Once upon a time, every illustrator worth his or her salt kept a morgue file. The term comes from newspapers (who in turn swiped it from the coroner’s office) and it refers to the collection of files of reference material and back issues usually stored in the basement.
An illustration morgue file is an accumulation of images, often clipped from magazines and old books, that illustrators used for reference when they needed to know how to draw something. Morgue files were often accumulated over the course of a career, and they were messy and difficult to organize.
Nowadays, there’s little need to keep a traditional morgue file; the internet provides a much larger inventory than any individual collector could hope to amass. Listed below are some of the places I might go if I needed to draw, say, a horned lizard riding an old fashioned bicycle:
As a kid growing up in the 70’s, the Scholastic Book Club had a lot to do with helping build my enthusiasm for reading. (Was there anything better than the day the books arrived?) This Flickr group is a trip down memory lane for those of us who grew up during that time period. I remember quite a few of these, and there are many more that I want to find and read right now. I’m dying to know, for example, the mystery behind The Horse Without a Head.
As an illustrator, I also love what the artists of the day were able to accomplish given the limits of printing technology. So many of these images are just one or two-color jobs, but the small palette only seems to add to the appeal of the book. It’s a master class in how to do more with less.
Cake Wrecks is a blog celebrating the worst, most inept, and the most unappetizing in the world of cake decoration. Here you’ll find day-glo coloring, plastic ornamentation, and all manner of creative misspelling applied to ceremonial desserts. Occasionally, the site even features an example of a decorator who really got it right. (Is Oprah here an example of the former or the latter? That’s up to you.)
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