Content Tagged ‘book design’

In this week’s Lit News, a few happy discoveries, and some bookish eye candy to celebrate spring. Enjoy, y’all.

Yes to floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and French doors! (From our Lookout Pinterest account. Do you follow us?)

Two book design videos we’re watching this week—both oldies but goodies:

Acclaimed book designer Coralie Bickford-Smith, who works in-house for Penguin, talks about her inspirations and the gorgeous redesign of these classics.

In the Oxford American’s SoLost series, Craig Jensen of Booklab II talks about the beautiful and unique books he’s made for thirty-five years.

Missed “The Confessions of David Remnick”? In this interview with the New Republic, the New Yorker editor talks difficult writers, Obama’s shortcomings, and learning from Anna Wintour.

Lookout Books is getting excited about AWP. We hope you’ll stop by our table at the Bookfair, and that you’ll attend The Debut Voices of Lookout Books, which is happening this Friday at 1:30 p.m. This reading will be the first time all four Lookout authors are in the same place, and the event will be followed by a book-signing at our Bookfair table. You’ll be able to grab signed copies of all our Lookout titles. We’re also excited about unveiling the limited edition chapbook that we printed in-house to commemorate the Debut Voices event.

We did a blog post about creating glyphs for the chapbook (read it here). Now we’re going to share how we designed the interior of the chapbook, which features complete stories from our three prose authors’ Lookout titles and two poems from our Lookout poet . Here’s a look into the process of designing and printing the book:

As the interior designer, I met with the interns doing cover design and together we decided on a trim size of 6” x 6”. Then I got to work on designing a page layout, asking for feedback as we worked.

1. An early version, with handwritten feedback. We needed to feature the author name more prominently, to group the name and title differently, and to give the text more room to breathe with some larger margins.

We at Lookout Books get it. We’re writers, readers, students, and teachers in addition to being boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, lovers, ‘just friends.’ Finding time for finding Valentine’s Day gifts is hard. So we’re here to help with a multi-part guide to literary gifts of love.

First up, introducing ‘Writs of Passion,’ a collection of stories by Lookout author Steve Almond. The stories unabashedly feature sex (Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto) and, for a limited time, are available in a six-book series. The covers line up to form a larger risque image, below.

In their recommendation of the series, About.com says, “I can’t think of anyone who writes about mostly heterosexual people having sex better than he does. It’s funny, weird, unexpected, with just enough four letter words ending in hard consonants to create tingly feelings from the inside out.”

To order Writs of Passion, follow instructions here.

(And while you’re at it, check out Almond’s book of short stories, God Bless America.)

image courtesy The Rumpus

thepenguinpress:

Shortlist has a great collection of redesigned book covers. Here are a few of our favorites…

There are some excellent designs here! Great seeing these old classics get some new looks!

dino-mind:

Chip Kidd

Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity.

Superhero Typographic Classifications by Matthew Olin
MFA Thesis Exhibition, December 2011

I know a behind-the-scenes look at Lookout should be, well, just that. You know, a sneaky behind-the-curtain glance. But for this post, we’ve found the spotlight! It’s not our fault: look at all these beautiful books!

The Publishing Laboratory is an enormous part of how Lookout Books ticks. It is home to bookbuilding and design courses, to computers with InDesign and Photoshop, to printers and scanners, to our glue binder and guillotine trimmer, and, of course, our ever-helpful Pub Lab TAs. We make so many things and spend so much time in the Pub Lab it’s easy to take it for granted.