The Alphabet from n9ve on Vimeo.
I would love to see this in flashcard format, something along the lines of the typographic card game.
Design
Near the end of National Novel Writing Month, GalleyCat announced a student designer was taking requests for book covers. That designer was Fena Lee, and I jumped at the opportunity to see what she would design for The Book of Coroc. I didn’t give her much to go with other than the somewhat vague description I had hastily written earlier in the month for my “Novel Info” section.
Xan is just a girl in the big city, trying to make ends meet. But all that changes when a mysterious book comes into her possession, along with a green-eyed stranger of few words and a price on her head from another world. Xan must learn how to harness the powers of the book if she is to save her world and many others from the Silver Queen and her army of tech clones.
The result:
After a month filled with frenzied writing, a rising urge to delete everything, and buckets of coffee, it is pretty amazing to see a visual interpretation of my concept. Kudos to Fena on the cover and the idea to use NaNoWriMo to hone her skills and build her portfolio. Be sure to check out all of her covers and submit your own novel if you participated.
Want to spread some cheer (or hate) this season? Check out Erin Hanson’s holiday symbolism cards for 12 unique sentiments.
via design work life
Time travel is one of my favorite storytelling devices, and designer Alex Griendling has combined it with a beautifully designed 2011 calendar.
7 Videogames.
16 TV shows.
34 movies.
95 individual instances of time travel.
1 timeline.
The calendar is only $20 and would make a great gift for the time traveler in your life. But hurry—there are only a handful of calendars still available.
via design work life
I spent the afternoon getting lost in this daily pattern project from designer and maker Rachael Beresh. For more of her gorgeous work, check out her portfolio.
Bianca Chang, a full-time designer and part-time paper artist and illustrator, makes beautiful paper typography.
via @juparnell
Puffin is celebrating their 70th anniversary with redesigned editions by six design and style icons. My favorite is illustrator Lauren Child’s take on The Secret Garden. I love how Mary’s discovery of the locked door beneath overgrown ivy is re-created for the reader in the peeling back of layers of paper to see the garden beneath.
Some of these limited anniversary editions are already sold out, but you can view the entire collection here.
via design work life
The book is alive. The book is paper, it’s print, it’s digital, it’s online, it’s on your phone, it’s in your purse, it’s under your pillow. The book is everywhere. The book is changing. What will we design next? We’ll keep designing the book, we’ll keep reinventing what it is, find new ways to read, new ways to write, new ways to publish, new ways to spread information.”
via @_mkimball
Today is Friday the 13th, a date that has come to be lucky for me. It’s the perfect day to shrug off superstitions and embrace a whole lot of color.
1. Santa Marta via Oh Joy!; 2. Rainbow umbrella via Victoria Pater
3. Daily drop cap by Jessica Hische; 4. Super epic cake by Hula Seventy
5. Impromptu rainbow via Swiss Miss; 6. Pantone calendar via Materialiste
I love bookshelves in all forms, even if the “shelves” are really just stacks of books next to my couch because there’s no actual shelf space left. I would much rather have a collection of books as the centerpiece of a room than a television. But given that the majority of my books are in boxes 3,000 miles away, I know just how much space plays a part in whether or not books are on display. When I stumbled across stacked paperback wallpaper earlier this week, I couldn’t help but daydream about how neat it would look in a small space. But the wallpaper lacks that handpicked quality that bookshelves have, and that is why I fell head over heels when I saw the Ideal Bookshelf paintings by artist Jane Mount.
I paint ‘ideal bookshelves’: people’s favorites of all time, within a genre or from a particular period in their lives.
As someone who does a lot of design work, I enjoy the process of turning graphics into ‘art’. And I love that a book is something created very personally and then mass-produced in order to affect many other people very personally. I group and paint them to turn them back into something very personal and intimate.”
Mount creates the paintings out of the reader’s choice of 10-20 books. It would be difficult to narrow down, but I know The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Bird by Bird, Interpreter of Maladies, and The Giving Tree would be a few of the ones on my list. What books would you choose?
