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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Design, Life, Digital: Best of DLD 2009

Predictability, simplicity, and why Munich is the epicenter of digital life and design.

This year’s DLD Conference just wrapped up in Munich last week, bestowing the wisdom of various Design, Life & Digital visionaries upon us mere mortals. And while some of the 20-plus talks were nauseatingly predictable (Mark Zuckerberg, we’re looking at you), we have a first-hand recommendation as to the most watch-worthy ones, thanks to a good friend who live-updated us straight from Munich.

First there’s the Telling Stories panel, dissecting the art of storytelling across a number of vehicles, from blogging to film to design. The panel featured New York Magazine icon Julia Allison, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur, Argentinian architect-turned-filmmaker Fernando Sulichin, and industrial design’s youngest rockstar, Ora-Ïto.

Then there was the Fashion & Business discussion, featuring designer duo Marc Ecko and Xavier Court, and FOCUS Magazine correspondent Susann Remke.

But perhaps most fascinating was the discussion on Simplicity — an intense dissection of beauty and art through the prism of simplicity and understatement. The panel — comprised of social media expert Adam Bly, Mercedez-Bens Design division chief Gorden Wagener, Kodak CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett and iconic Italian architect Carlo Ratti — looked at the notion of simplicity from a variety of angles, from car design to content-sharing platforms to architecture, exposing some unsuspected universals that translate uniformly across a multitude of different disciplines.

See all the talks and panels on the DLD09 website and be your own judge.

Meanwhile, the live-streaming of TED 2009 begins in just a little while. Follow us on Twitter for exclusive real-time updates on the talks today through Saturday.

Thanks, Michal

Artist Spotlight: Volkan Ergen

Immersive urban avant-garde film, or what a tabby cat has to do with the Bosphorus at night.

Turkish filmmaker Volkan Ergen does what we like to call “immersive urban avant-garde cinematography” – film that fully submerges you into the aura of a city, from its sights and sounds, to its distinct color scheme, to its can’t-quite-put-your-finger-on feel.

In Two Wings, he explores the rich magnetism of a stroll down the Bosphorus in Istanbul. Shot in Ergen’s signature split screen, the film is all afternoon decadence of light and color, oozing the tangible and raw sounds of the city, embraced by a hypnotic music score

Expect captures the inner quietude of waiting amidst the loudness of one’s surroundings.

See more of Volkan’s work on Vimeo, or brave the language barrier by Google-Translating your way into his personal site.

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The Sky in Motion: 7,000 NASA Images in a Mesmerizing Timelapse

The Earth, the Moon, the stars, and the joys of geekdom.

This being the International Year of Astronomy and all, we thought it would be kind of nice to swap the daily screen stare for a wide look at the open skies. Granted, we can’t really do that, but we can try to do both.

The Sky in Motion is a fascinating, hypnotic project featuring several time-lapse videos, each composed of over 7,000 images revealing the richness of our skies. Featured in NASA‘s Astronomy Picture of the Day, this video blends the romantic obsession over the Moon, the Sun and the stars with the scientific awe of meteors, satellites, and crepuscular rays — all framed by the wonder of Earth’s own rotation. 

Seems like NASA has come a long way from those laughable times we shall not speak of again.

Thanks, @guykawasaki.

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