the blog of Ecotone magazine and Lookout Books
A hilarious poster project, displaying the worst feedback designers have ever gotten has been posted at SharpSuits.net.
We loved these and are confident that all our future authors coming out of the MFA Program and Publishing Lab will be educated enough not to ask these questions.
– John Mortara, Lookout Intern
One of the cool things about the MFA program here is the emphasis of what you’re putting on the page. Not like similes or metaphors and whatnot, but whether you’re using a slab serif as your body text (big mistake, that). As the semester winds down and as the Bookbuilding students here begin their final project (designing and creating a chapbook of their own work), I thought I’d share some of my favorite websites about typography and design.
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One of my favorite aspects of being a Lookout intern is getting to be a part of a teaching press. We work on our Lookout projects in the Publishing Laboratory, and on any given day the lab is full of Bookbuilding students designing layouts and putting together chapbooks, undergrads compiling the UNCW BFA anthology, and Pub Lab TAs tweaking the design of a Writers Week broadside or doing treatments for Ecotone’s next issue.
Box Book by Anna Sutton (Lookout Intern)
I used this tutorial to make a beautiful paper box for my Bookbuilding class here at UNCW (taught by Lookout’s own Emily Smith).
Make it cooler! Print a poem, short short, manifesto, or image on the inside of your paper before folding. Make sure you print a directive on the front corner of your page, like open me or unfold me. If you use a slightly bigger piece of paper, you can make a top for your box, too.
Bonus! If you make your own, send a photo our way and we’ll post it here on the blog!
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!
For those of you that love designing book interiors as much as we do!
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.
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