From the category archives:

Project Focus

This is the second article about dealing with a cover design project with artwork supplied by the client. In the first, I looked at the book cover design process for Chris Finlan’s Not A Fire Exit. This time I’m going to look at the designs prepared for Bill Goldberg’s The “And” Principle.
Here is the artwork [...]

4 comments

Books come in all different shapes and sizes and with many different purposes. Book design takes these diverse uses into account.
Recently we designed Noah Alper’s Business Mensch, which combines memoir with business advice drawn from the author’s career as an entrepreneur. Along the way Noah tells numerous fascinating stories about the ups and downs [...]

Add Your Comment

For offset printing, 2-color covers can be much more economical than 4-color covers, particularly for short-run books.
I discussed two 2-color covers for self-published books in a previous article and explained why these covers are often preferred by publishers. Here I look at two covers done for trade publishers.
This first cover was designed for a [...]

Add Your Comment

Before the advent of digital printing and print-on-demand production, publishers had no choice but to print on offset presses, and most books today continue to be printed by offset.
Book presses are large, noisy, oily pieces of heavy machinery. There are separate parts of the press for each color that will be printed, with separate sets [...]

2 comments

One of the first books I produced for Berrett-Koehler Publishers in San Francisco was The Age of Participation by Patricia McLagan and Christo Nel.
The overarching framework of the story of the movement of politics toward participative governance required a theme to hold the parts together yet show their relationship to the whole. These part-opening pages [...]

1 comment

Project Focus: Small Square Books

by Joel Friedlander on September 1, 2009

in Book Design, Cover Design, Project Focus, Samples

For a while clients seemed to be asking for a lot of small, square books. I had done several of these and noticed some similarities in their design.
Some types of book are square to accommodate both horizontal and vertical subject matter. A good example is art books of all kinds, paintings, photographs, etchings all benefit [...]

2 comments