Art of The Cover: Book Cover Design Inspiration

Shepard Fairey on George Orwell, where we live, 8 decades of iconic cover designs, and what Banksy and a tranny have in common. Oh my!

Covers. Quite the underappreciated art form. And if no one judged a book by its cover, why does so much creative gruntwork go into designing the truly best ones? After doing a piece on books by famous designers recently, we got inspired to hunt down broader tributes to the art of book and magazine cover design. And here’s what we came up with.

YOUR EUSTACE

Ever since the very first issue of The New Yorker in the 1920′s, the peculiar Eustace Tilley character has been gracing its cover. Last week, The New Yorker wrapped up their second annual Your Eustace contest soliciting reader reimaginings of Eustace.

And as much as we like to think of New Yorker readers as unnecessarily self-righteous cultural elitists without so much as a smidgen of original thought, we have to admit they turned out to be a pretty creative crowd. At least that’s what the submissions, ranging from the bizarre to the brilliant, indicate.

As for the 12 winners, we can’t help appreciating the sheer audacity of the clever Banksy mock-up and the hopelessly hilarious trasvestite Eustace — after all, judgments of The New Yorker‘s merits aside, cultural relevance is the one thing this iconic publication has always stood for. And what more culturally relevant than Banksy and trannies?

ESQUIRE COVER GALLERY

Believe it or not, not every Esquire cover ever designed is a meticulously decorated storefront to Hollywood’s half-clad A-list. Back in the olden days, it was more about delightful Claymationeseque cartoonishness and less about Jessica Simpson’s plunging or altogether nonexistent neckline.

How do we know that? It has come to our attention that Esquire maintains a rich and extensive Cover Gallery, dating all the way back to 1933. And it’s quite extraordinary.

So spend a few minutes glimpsing back at 8 decades of cultural commentary by some of the 20th century’s most iconic artists, including illustrators like Abner Dean and George Petty, art directors like Jean-Paul Goude and Paul Rand, and even legendary adman George Lois.

via Coudal

FWIS

They do book cover designs. No, really. And they do them well.

The Fwis Covers collection is as broad and eclectic as it is creatively marvelous. It spans the entire spectrum of design — from the gaudy manga kitsch of Tezuka, to the delightfully somber minimalism of Against Happiness, to the appropriate retro-geekiness of Game Feel, to the unmistakable Shepard Fairey take on Animal Farm.

Go ahead, explore the Fwis Collection — you’ll find yourself curious and intrigued and hungry for books…judged entirely by the covers. It’s okay.

THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE

Granted, this isn’t really about covers — although it kind of is, implicitly, by way of being about something covers couldn’t exist without: The wonderful world of books. Easily one of the most wonderful stop-motion films we’ve ever seen, this one comes from Apt and Asylum Films, celebrating 4th Estate Publishers‘ 25th Anniversary.

And now we want to live there, too.

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TED 2009 Highlights: Day 2

Lots and lots (and lots) of brilliance, wrapped in fascination and tied with a shiny ribbon of sheer jaw-droppingness.

Despite our sleep-deprived state, we managed to live-blog our way through another day of TED. Well, sort of — the guys at Long Beach had severe technical difficulties on their end, which sort of reduced TED to ED for a couple of hours.

But sleeplessness and glitches notwithstanding, it was a phenomenal day embezzled with a number of well-deserved standing ovations. Neurologist extraordinaire Oliver Sacks opened the See session with a fascinating talk about a specific kind of visual hallucinations in perfectly sane blind patients, called Charles Bonnet syndrome, which occur because visual receptors become hyperactive when they receive no real input. Apparently, over 10% of blind people get this, but only about 1% ever acknowledge it in fear of being ridiculed and perceived as insane — what a stark reminder of the clash between cognitive health and social health.

UCSB researcher JoAnn Kuchera-Morin followed, introducing perhaps the most fascinating piece of the night: The AlloSphere machine, a “scientific data discovery and artistic creation tool.” She proceeded to show phenomenal imagery, including the AlloBrain — a project that builds medical narrative through real fMRI data mapped sonicly and visually, with tremendously rich potential for medical application.

Also shown: the multi-center hydrogen bonds of a new material used for transparent solar cells, a clearly gigantic stride for clean energy. The footage itself was absolutely stunning, especially framed in the knowledge that it’s all real, not a CGI simulation.

Another visually and conceptually captivating talk came next, with light and space sculptor Olafur Eliasson. He tossed the audience into a visual experiment right there on the stage screen, demonstrating the link between eye and brain in a very raw, tangible way before introducing his equally compelling work — work that is, above all, creating a sense of consequence by making space accessible and instilling in people a sense of community and togetherness.

Olafur’s entire talk was a string of eye-opening epiphanies on the nature of art, our relationship to the world and each other, our shared sense of responsibility.

Art is obviously not just about decorating the world, but also about taking responsibility.

True that.

Ed Ulbrich was next, with perhaps the biggest shock-value jaw-dropper of the night: He took us behind the scenes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, revealing that Brad Pitt’s character was actually entirely computer-generated from the neck up. Crafting it was so laborious that just the person responsible for the character’s eye system spent over two full years on it. (Pause on that for a moment.)

They also had to create every possible lighting condition for the character, in order to make him appear realistic and believable in all scenes.

Their biggest challenge was animating facial emotion. Traditionally, facial animation is done by recording the motion on 100 surface polygons, with 100 tracking points. But they found that the richest emotional information came from the stuff between the points. So, unsurprisingly to us, they turned to one of our greatest heroes: Paul Ekman and his brilliant Facial Action Coding System.

Setting up a system of 3D cameras, they were able to record a surface of over 100,000 polygons, tracking 10,000 points.

We ended up calling the entire process “emotion capture” rather than “motion capture.”

In the end, Ulbrich made an excellent point that most of us hardly give much thought to: Despite the technological advances and the computer-generated character, animating it still fell on Brad Pitt’s unique acting skill and dramatic capacity — because the Button character, tech smoke-and-mirrors notwithstanding, is but a digital puppet to be operated entirely by its actor-puppeteer.

Closing the See session was experimental audio-visual artist Golan Levin, who introduced a mind-blowing subtitling technology that animates text with the amplitude, pitch and frequency of the speaker’s voice, so that the text literally becomes alive with meaning. Levin also revealed his fascination with the human gaze, introducing a revolutionary eye-tracking system aimed at making the computer aware of what it is looking at and able to respond.

What if art was aware we were looking at it, how could it respond?

He proceeded to show off another rather peculiar (by which we mean creepy-cool) extension of the technology: The Double-Taker, an enormous eye of a snout that follows a person as he or she moves through space, in a very organic albeit creepy way.

And although we were teched out of much of the Understand session that followed, regretfully missing anthropologist Nina Jablonski‘s much- anticipated talk, we did catch Elizabeth Gilbert‘s profound insight on the paradox of the creative process, which is always inevitably tied to anguish as artists fear being unable to outdo themselves creatively.

The final session, Invent, opened with iconic yet controversial architect Daniel Libeskind, whose reconstruction plan for Ground Zero was the people’s choice, but was tragically crushed by commercial pressures and had to give way to the current winner. Libeskind talked about the clash between hand and computer, pointing out the challenge of making the computer respond to the hand rather than vise-versa.

Showcasing some of his phenomenal commercial and concept work, he raised deeper questions about the role of architecture in the human story.

Architecture is not only the giving of answers, it’s also the asking of questions.

Green auto pioneer Shai Agassi followed. Besides showing the enormity of the scale, on which cars impact the world, he also drew a rather brilliant analogy: Before the Industrial Revolution, much of the U.K.’s labor force came from an immoral element — human slaves. And as soon as slavery ended, the Industrial Revolution began. We are, in effect, getting much of our energy from an immoral source, subjecting the planet to a form of slavery. Ending “planetary slavery” is the only way to the next social revolution.

True that.

The remaining talks showcased a broad range of truly revolutionary innovation in robotics and medicine, from Catherine Mohr‘s amazing surgical robots, to Robert Full‘s brilliant technology simulating the toe-peeling and air-righting of the gecko, to Daniel Kraft‘s Marrow Miner tool that bypasses transplant pain by allowing local anaeshtesia, harvesting 10 times more marrow.

Finally, polymorphic playwright Sarah Jones, one of the best entertainers to ever hit TED stage, closed the session with her truly — truly — captivating performance of her array of characters, each of whom she channels to an unbelievable level of believability. That’s one talk you’d want to see when it becomes available.

The last segment was the awarding of this year’s TED Prize, the streaming of which was accessible to everyone online and available in select theaters across the U.S. The winners — marine preservation advocate Sylvia Earle, space explorer Jill Tarter, and music education pioneer José Abreu — are every bit as deserving as you’d expect, so be sure to check out their wishes — and if you’re passionate about that field, you can even offer help to each of the three on his or her TED Prize page.

We’ll be live-blogging today as well, so be sure to follow us on Twitter if you’re into, you know, hearing stuff before everyone else does.

TED 2009 Highlights: Day 1

A cultural dialogue on sex, Bill Gates releases more bugs into the world, and lots of caffeine.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first — live-blogging TED turned out to be much harder than we thought, especially fighting the 10-hour time difference and Red-Bulling our way to the dog hours of the morning. But it was tremendously exciting.

You can check the speaker schedule for the line-up, but be sure to catch on our real-time updates, as there were a number of surprise appearances, including two of our greatest heroes: Al Gore, who gave us an even more chilling update on global warming, and Yves Behar, who unveiled his latest project — the fully electric Mission One motorcycle, a beautifully designed 150-mph wonder.

But perhaps the most noteworthy of the day’s wildcards was a short cameo by professional jaw-dropper Cindy Gallop, who unveiled her new site, MakeLoveNotPorn.com — a humorously framed yet enormously culturally ambitious project that takes the myths of pornography and balances them with the reality of sex.

Gallop talked about the failure of cultural institutions to address the issue of sex adequately, especially to teenagers.

So it’s not surprising that hard pornography has, in effect, become sexual education.

The site even invites visitors to submit their own porn myth busts, which Gallop hopes would create an open dialogue about the cultural meaning of sex. And this — the ability to create an open forum for a cultural taboo — is just one of the billion reasons we love TED.

Another delight — despite our initial skepticism — was Bill Gates, who not only managed to release a box of very real mosquitoes into the audience while talking about malaria mortality, but also cracked a rather hilarious impromptu joke during the Q&A at the end: Chris asked him what he’d like written on his tombstone when he dies “in 10 or 15 years,” to which Gates responded with something to the effect of:

10 or 15? I certainly hope I live longer than that. So, in that case, it’ll say “Check my pulse!”

A geek god, an iconic philanthropist, and now a standup comic? Who new. Even we in the vicious Mac camp have to give it to the guy.

Finally, two simply titled yet truly promising Earth-centric documentaries were revealed. Home, by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, explores life on Earth from a bird’s eye perspective, showcasing phenomenal aerial landscapes that are disappearing before our eyes.

Oceans, produced by the amazing Jake Eberts in collaboration with Jacques Perrin, was edited down from over 300 hours of footage from a worldwide deep-ocean expedition costing $75 million. From the phenomenal cinematography to the pure stride-stopping brilliance of the Blue Planet that it captures, Oceans is an absolute must-see.

And while both films are a gloomy reminder that we’re going faster than the planet can sustain, they also do something much more valuable: Give us hope there is still time to avoid disaster.

We’ll be live-blogging today as well, so be sure to follow us on Twitter if you’re into, you know, hearing stuff before everyone else does.