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.

Book Cover Design: Alex Camlin of Da Capo Press

Quick Post: Book Cover Design

Alex Camlin of Da Capo Press chats about his experience, his inspiration, and his work…

An excerpt from The Casual Optimist:

I really enjoy working on books that are a bit off-beat or quirky. Recently, I’ve worked covers for a Karaoke memoir, a history of jetpacks, and a fake autobiography of Steve Jobs. I find that the books with moderate-to-low sales expectations (usually due to their niche subject matter) are the best to work on. Very few people bother to deconstruct what I’ve done, and the off-beat content usually leads to some interesting visuals.

A shout out to @designrelated on Twitter for posting this informative Q+A!

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!**