authorship and design

From my experience of working in the publishing industry, it can be a mixed blessing when an author offers to lend a hand in the design of a book cover. Often, the author's ideas can act as a springboard which helps bring about a really unique, or apt, design. Equally, an author's dogmatic or unrealistic expectations can lead to many a fraught conversation. Either way, I enjoyed reading this account of Orhan Panuk's input in the design process, from the Guardian.

"Like his earlier melancholic memoirs of his Turkish childhood and youth, the front of Orhan Pamuk's latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, draws the eye with a sepia-tinted image evoking the romance of bygone Istanbul. But at the Southbank's Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Nobel-prizewinning author raised smiles with the tale of his use of technology to enhance the appeal of the cover photograph of the new book. The picture, featuring an open-top car containing three smiling women and two men, the latter with hair gelled back in 1950s fashion, was originally bought by the writer from a website he called "the Turkish eBay". There was just one problem: its backdrop was that of woodland somewhere in Turkey's interior. Pamuk explained how he had used Photoshop to resolve the issue. With a few mouse clicks, the car and its occupants were transported to the Bosphorus, the busy shipping lane running through Istanbul, complete with familiar minarets on a facing shore. Graphics wizards at Faber later introduced burn marks to the top half of the image. Pamuk also revealed that there had been worries about what the car's unknown occupants would make of their unwitting cover stardom. There was relief, however, when one of the women, pictured in a headscarf, was traced. A photo was sent to him showing her, now aged 88, happily holding the novel. Whether other authors take such a hands-on approach to the design of their book covers is unclear. However, for Pamuk, a self-described "repressed artist" who once harboured ambitions to forge a career with a brush, doing so must be particularly satisfying".

introducing the sarcmark

Brilliant. Read on.

joe columbo's smoke glass

The following is one of many interesting design projects I looked at while at an Engineering conference in Budapest recently. The design, by Joe Columbo, makes use of negative space to design the 'Smoke glass'.

joe colombo - ‘smoke glass’, 1964
the sculptural shape of this unusual glass speaks for itself. its unique stem invites you to grasp the form. the name of the design was born from its function: with the balance between the forefinger and the thumb it is possible to hold both the glass and a cigarette with the same hand.

the cylindrical form is in perfect harmony with the foot.

the ‘double’, which are two glasses in one make it possible to turn the glass over for a sip of water or aperitif.

More pictures and info here.

design for life

Anyone else falling rapidly in love with French designer and all-round-genius Philippe Starck, courtesy of the BBC's 'Design for Life' programme? I am - it's great value TV (essentially The Apprentice for designers) and I think Starck is the most charming man in the world. He is a force of nature; imitating a klaxon when he enters a room, milking his heavy French accent for all it is worth, and coming up with adorably eccentric soubriquets left right and centre (describing evolution, he declares that "to start weez, we wazz bacteria! Zen feesh. After, we become frog! It ees not exactly ze real story. But eet's close!").

Best of all is the way he fires people. No agressive finger jabbing, no scorn. Instead he merely saunters over, shrugs apologetically, and gently delivers two warm, deadly kisses, one to each cheek. Mwa Mwa. You're fired.

You can catch up on iPlayer.

arial or helvetica

I'm sure I'd never have been able to tell the difference between these sorts of thing a few years ago, but you do learn a few interesting things during a career in publishing. As everyone should know, the font 'Arial' is basically just a shit version of 'Helvetica' - the differences are small but important.

If you think you can tell them apart, try this quiz. I got 8/10, which isn't bad.

Arial or Helvetica?

polar books

This bookshelf, via Rosie's lovely Old Old Fashioned blog, is absolutely brilliant! How cool is that! Sadly he costs a pretty sum; two thousand pounds. But that seems almost worth it, somehow.

currently reading

Observant readers may have noted that I've been playing with my blogroll over on the right, importing the new blogger system which lists blogs according to how recently they've been updated. I think it's probably a more useful system, although you'll note that I've not (yet) deleted my Essential Blogs list, which is still visible further down the page. Any thoughts about the new system? Hopefully it'll get used by other people, rather than just me.

Anyway, one side product of populating the new system is that I've had the chance to seek out and add some new things to read, as well as pruning a few blogs which have fallen out of use. So here a few things on the web I recommend for this week:

- Over on the Breakfast In Bed blog - which has plenty of great stuff on music, books, socialising and travel - Rowan has recently been serving up a mouthwatering set of posts on food; she's writing about food every single day for a month, in fact, and lording it over those of us scraping by on leftovers and cheap takeaways. Definitely worth dipping into a daily basis, although in recent days I've learned only to do so after lunch, when my appetite is sated.

- Over at his Inside A Skinny Mind blog, Jimmy has written a bunch of great posts recently, like this write up of a bit of religious curiosity and these thoughts about the miracle effects of technology on long term relationships. My favourite was his description of one of the most bizarre job interviews I've ever heard about, which is here. Extract below.

"The Newlook people opened up the doors and led us all downstairs to the accessories department, and there must have been at least fifty retail aspirants there. The store manager came out and started explaining what was going to happen. Basically we were going to be divided into groups of six, each member of the group got a celebrity profile and you had three minutes to run to the rails behind the escalator to find the perfect outfit for your celebrity. The nightmare only started there"

- I keep finding blogs that are prettier than mine - cue much gnashing of teeth and cursing. A few have caught my attention, recently. Kept In A Jar is lovely, and I'm so jealous of Debbie's Glastonbury weekend, which looks even better than the real one, and of her journal, which is plainly beautiful.

- Old, Old Fashioned is lovely, too - full of nice clothes, nice design and pretty photographs. It sounds like Rosie, the author, is preparing to move to Oslo, so in her instance I'm not just jealous of the cool looking blog but of her entire lifestyle, bah.

- And in mentioning these lovely blogs, I must also send you to Make Do and Mend, which I've read for a while now and never mentioned, which is shameful not only because it's good but because it's written by my lovely friend Laura. It concentrates on good design, beautiful illustrations, and Laura's own craft-related adventures. Go see.

- Here's a blog I've just discovered; MFM is a brighton based music blog, and well worth a look, with recent reviews of Dizzee Rascal, Late of the Pier and Beck.

- Finally, another hearty recommendation for another friend's blog - Amy's excellent One Million Kisses For One Million Girls is super; documenting her ideas, great taste in music and work on Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams, a fanzine that I'll blog about soon, and which you should buy.

There are doubtless other things I've missed. I'll try to do blog round-ups more regularly.

laptop club / monster engine

I meant to link to this a week or two ago, after my friend David pointed it out to me, but didn't get round to it. Here then, is the Laptop Club. It's a lovely project, one where a bunch of kids, aged around seven to nine, have designed and drawn their own laptops; the results, which give clear indications of the children's interests, are really fascinating. It makes me realise how out of touch I am with children - having had precisely no contact with them, for the most part, since I was one - and how they ask for features I couldn't possibly have predicted.

A lot, for example, include buttons labelled with animal names. It took me a few seconds to realise that these must refer to digital pets. Elsewhere there are buttons labelled 'toys', 'ringtone', 'shopping' and, more than once, the rather mystifying 'special'. It hammers home how integrated computers now are into children's play routine. Additionally the extent to which social lives are now complemented by online activity is truly staggering. I was 19 years old before I first emailed someone. Lots of the kids include buttons prioritised with the names of favourite friends, with buttons for bebo, myspace and messenger too. It's interesting how so many of the children sideline the actual alphabet keys, stuffing the letters into uncomfortable corners, leaving space for gaming and web-related buttons. That's to be expected, I suppose.

The button that I thought most interesting was 'private', which obviously has become an issue for children sick of their parents' understandable interest in their online activities. 'Secret' is used too. Amusingly, one child squeezes in both 'firewall' and 'cookies', which is an indication of how technologically literate kids are now.

All this aside, I genuinely like the design of these things - apart from the fact that they are so lopsided, they actually look reasonably intuitive. I suspect that kids really would get something from these laptops that they lack with the standard keyboard layout. How nice it would be to see someone actually making a couple of prototypes. Of course, the one laptop per child machines are designed for kids, but I'm not much familiar with that design yet. Anyway, these drawings are most interesting, I think.

Meanwhile, and on a not entirely dissimilar subject, have a look at this, 'cos it's glorious. Dave Devries is an artist who specialises in redrawing children's doodles as fully realised monsters. Amazing stuff. Some examples below, from The Monster Engine...