Coralie Bickford-Smith: Book Cover Design UPDATE

Photo courtesy of Design*Sponge

A few months ago, I posted an excerpt from a story about Coralie Bickford-Smith – the designer responsible for many wonderful book covers at Penguin Classics.

Well, just today, Design*Sponge (if you don’t know this site, you should!!) posted a more extended interview with Ms. Bickford-Smith.  So, I thought I would share it with you here.  Click on the link below to see the full post in its natural habitat…

An brief excerpt from the Design*Sponge interview:

…That’s the nature of cover design really – the designs are there to serve the writing, and there’s such a range of material that we design for that a personal style isn’t necessarily what you want the customer to see.

Penguin Books: Designer Interview

A quick post about book design:  What a challenge to have to catch a consumer’s eye with the spine of a book on a shelf or a small cover…

The intro from an interview with Coralie Bickford-Smith of Penguin Books (UK) at Design Related:

Coralie is an award winning book cover designer and has created several acclaimed series designs forPenguin Books. Art director Jim Stoddart first spotted her latent talent six years ago in the page layouts for a supermarket pet club magazine. At which point Coralie breathed a huge sigh of relief, as on the whole she prefers designing book covers. Recently she has been working on projects with students at London College of Communication, passing on the principle that underpins her own work: ’stop designing, start playing’.

**Shoutout to @DesignObserver on Twitter for the heads up – if you don’t follow them, you should!**

Designers Without Borders

Photo by Pentagram

There is a great new exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in the one and only NYC:  Design For A Living World.  A project conceived by The Nature Conservancy, the intent is to examine the nature of the products we use – where they come from, how they are made, and how they impact the world we live in.  From the project description:

The Nature Conservancy invited ten designers to create new objects from sustainable materials sourced from around the world.  Wood, plants, wool and other organic materials were transformed into intriguing objects, revealing extraordinary stories about regeneration and the human connection to the Earth’s lands and waters.  Together, designers and consumers can reshape our materials economy and help advance a global conservation ethic by choosing sustainable materials that support, rather than deplete, endangered places.

Create | Conserve | Inspire

From Kate Spade to Hella Jongerius to Maya Lin, the participating designers are among best in their chosen crafts and the thoughtful products they developed for the project are both beautiful and elegantly functional.  Each of these talented artists, and I use the term deliberately, exhibit the ways in which design can address world-scale issues.

The desire to conserve materials reflects a general awareness that wasteful consumption, in its many forms, is not only unnecessary but irresponsible.  When the materials we use have their genesis in struggling communities whose very survival rests upon their ability to make a living from the lands on which they live, it is imperative that we allow these communities to manage their resources wisely so that they are long term assets.

There is a remarkable store of creativity that exists across the globe, ready and willing to be challenged with the issues of our time.  Design For A Living World is an inspiring example of the wonderful solutions that can result from re-imagining the uses of materials we encounter on a daily basis.

There are too many photos to include all of them here, but take a look at a few of the raw materials below and try to re-imagine for yourself what they might inspire you to create.

(All of the beautiful photos are by Ami Vitale) 

 

 

 

MORE FASCINATING INFORMATION THAT YOU CAN’T RESIST.  TRUST ME:

• An in-depth review of the projects across the world – from Alaska to Australia – by Pentagram
• Photos from the exhibit at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum – by Pentagram

Marian Bantjes: Way Good.

Marian Bantjes is way good.  I don’t remember how I found her website.  I don’t remember what I was looking for.  All I know is that when I saw what she does, I realized that she has an amazing artistic talent – exquisite in it’s execution.  Her work is intricate.  It’s creative.  There’s an essence of  ‘quirk’ (I mean, really…cake?). 

But, what I most appreciate is that she is willing to explore her already-pretty-darn-good-at-it craft, continuing to grow and enjoying the process:

I do not know if I am lazy or driven. A little of both. While I tend to work every day, from morning to night (I’m frequently working past midnight), my days are relatively stress free. In the summer I tend to take a lot of breaks and sit in the sun or go for a walk. I spend a lot of time thinking. Just staring into space and thinking. Does this count as work? Sometimes. When I wake up in the morning with the perfect solution to a given problem, have I been working while I was sleeping? Perhaps. - (An excerpt from Ms. Bantjes’ About Me reflections)

I love that.  To paraphrase Jack Nicholson’s character in that movie, Ms. Bantjes makes me wanna be a better designer/writer/whatever I’m calling myself on a given day.   Yes, Marian Bantjes is way good.  And in a good way.

Have a look!