Introduction / Table of Contents

Welcome to my design scrapbook. Entries are arranged by book, with examples of various good and bad design features in each. You can browse through as normal, or use this contents page to navigate.

Athfield Architects, Julia Gatley – bindingbinding, chapter heading, colour, cover, format, half title, hierarchies, images, index, jacket, margins, measure, paper stock, part title, text, title

Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning, Jennifer Hay et al – binding, colour, cover, images, jacket, margins, paper stock

Bitterblue, Kristin Cashore – chapter heading, cover, half title page, images, part title page, title page

Briefcase, John Adams – binding, colour, cover, images, paper stock

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett – colour, cover

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, JK Rowling – images, imprint, text

The Fierce Little Woman and the Wicked Pirate, Joy Cowley and Jo Davies / Joy Cowley and Sarah Davis – book shape, book size, colour, cover, format, images, text

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (ebook) – book size, chapter heading, colour, cover, ebook, format, measure, paper stock

Newtons Sleep, Daniel O’Mahony – chapter heading, cover, half title page, headers and footers, measure, part title page, title page, text

The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary – binding, book size, headers and footers, margins, measure, paper stock, text

Paper Blossoms, Ray Marshall – book size, book shape, colour, cover, format

Pat the Zombie, Aaron Ximm and Kaveh Soofi – binding, book shape, book size, colour, cover, format, images, text

Radical Skubic Jewelry – binding, colour, cover, images, margins, measure, paper stock

Reflections of a Solitary Hamster, Astrid Desbordes - text

The Selected Works of TS Spivet, Reif Larsen – imprint, text

Spineless Classics – binding, book size, book shape, images, measure, text

There was an Old Woman, Gavin Bishop – binding, book shape, book size, colour, margins, paper stock, text

The Unforgiven Harvest and The Lead Wait, Jo Randerson – colour, cover, headers and footers, hierarchies, images, margins, part title page, text, title page

I am also doing an ongoing study of NZ YA Covers in 2011, which can be found here. I hope to continue updating this through the year as and when I have time, and perhaps do a follow-up for 2012 releases.

BITTERBLUE, Kristen Cashore

This is a beautiful book with gorgeous design. The jacket cover is fairly generic-YA-fantasy, but hidden inside are some of my favourite bits of design in this whole scrapbook.

TRENDS IN 2011 NZ YA FICTION

Inspired by Kate Hart's intense study of the covers of American YA titles released in 2011, I have done far less work than Hart and looked into the covers of NZ YA released last year. Hart had 624 covers for her study; I have 25*.

I decided to determine whether any trend in colour schemes could be found in 2011's YA covers. I worked out each cover's dominant colour by the scientific method of eyeing it up, and sorted them along a rainbow graph. The results are ...

Well, it looks like we're still keen on the traditional shades of tan, but blue is by far and away the most popular colour for book covers. 

*If you notice I've missed one, let me know!

FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM, JK Rowling

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a companion to the Harry Potter books. It purports to be Harry’s copy of the book, and contains a variety of annotations and doodles ‘written’ by him, Ron and Hermione. The annotations are handwritten - a normal typeface really wouldn't work for this sort of feature.

As this is a textbook, not all of the additions are relevant to the text...

THE SELECTED WORKS OF TS SPIVET, Reif Larsen

This is a highly annotated and illustrated book, the idea being that the narrator has supplied the reader with a great deal of information additional to the main text. This extends to the preliminary material, where the book’s Subject metadata has been set out as though they are the character’s notes inserted into the imprint page. This is a clever touch, as it ties in with design elements used throughout the rest of the book to put a bit of interest in a page not many readers would ordinarily look at.

REFLECTIONS OF A SOLITARY HAMSTER, Astrid Desbordes

This book's text is very interesting: it is not set in a typeface, but has been hand-written by the designer. Tiny differences in the lettering give it an organic feel suited to the cartoonish illustrations.

JANE EYRE on the KINDLE APP FOR ANDROID

The trouble with e-book design is that quite often, it’s not the e-book’s design you are seeing: yes, formatting errors can make a book unreadable, but if an e-book is cleanly formatted and has no or few images, then, depending on your reader, you can practically redesign it yourself.

I don’t own a Kindle, but I do have the Kindle app on my phone. It’s not ideal to read from: the screen is small and back-lit, and I’m forever bumping the screen the wrong way and having to scroll back to my place. Nevertheless, the app provides quite a few options for redesigning an e-book’s text to better fit your device.

Some design elements are immovably formatted into the e-book. For this version of Jane Eyre (which I ‘purchased’ for free from Amazon), these include the cover, line and section breaks, chapter headings, and indented paragraphs.

Jane Eyre, all alone in my Kindle library

SPINELESS CLASSICS

These books have the most cunning binding of all - none!

Spineless Classics are posters that contain the entire text of classic works of literature, cunningly set so that the text creates a silhouetted shape related to the book. They are primarily meant as decoration, rather than to be read, but it is possible to read them if you don't mind climbing a wall and squinting at them. I will focus on their design, both how well it looks and how it relates to the book's content.

As with all endeavours, some are more successful than others.

... I'm going to try really hard not to just repost their entire list, but bear with me. Here goes:

Peter Pan, 700x1000mm

PAT THE ZOMBIE, Aaron Ximm and Kaveh Soofi

Like Paper Blossoms, Pat the Zombie uses a children’s book format in a book for an adult audience. Pat the Zombie is a parody of children’s tactile books; a ‘cruel adult spoof’, as it styles itself. The book’s design aesthetic successfully mimics the spoofed genre, but poor production means Pat the Zombie the book looks even tackier than its premise promises. Sadly, Pat the Zombie fails where Paper Blossoms succeeded. Both tactile and pop-up books require design and construction to work together, but Pat the Zombie’s design fails to take into account the limitations of its construction, and its construction is flimsy and poorly designed.

Pat the Zombie in its presentation box. 

THE UNFORGIVEN HARVEST and THE LEAD WAIT, Jo Randerson

This book contains two plays by playwright Jo Randerson. It was published by PlayMarket as part of their ongoing New Zealand Play Series. 

Front cover

PAPER BLOSSOMS, Ray Marshall

This is an art book with a difference: a collection of five pop-up bouquets to adorn your dinner table.

Pop-up books are usually meant to entertain children. While retaining the format, Marshall has designed his book with an entirely different audience in mind, and added elements to the book’s construction where necessary to ensure it works as intended.

The front cover of the book. Note elastic loop
and absence of the word 'pop-up'

THE FIERCE LITTLE WOMAN AND THE WICKED PIRATE, Joy Cowley and Jo Davies / Joy Cowley and Sarah Davis

This post is a bit of compare-and-contrast between the 1984 and 2010 versions of Joy Cowley’s The Fierce Little Woman and the Wicked Pirate. This story was originally published by Shortland Publications Limited with illustrations by Jo Davies, and in 2010 was republished by Gecko Press in a new format, with new illustrations by Sarah Davis. Overall, Gecko Press’ edition has far higher production quality and a superior design, creating a far more appealing book.

NEWTONS SLEEP, Daniel O'Mahony

I’m always saddened by books like this. Regardless of quality of writing, poor design puts me off picking a book up, let alone reading it. Unfortunately for Newtons Sleep, the unappealing exterior design continues inside, with cramped typesetting and a lack of footers and headers making both reading and navigating the book difficult.

The front cover

ATHFIELD ARCHITECTS, Julia Gatley

Books about design bear the greatest expectations when it comes to their own design – it’s hard to sell a reader on your subject if you fail to live up to it yourself (and you are a book). Athfield Architects ably lives up to the challenge. This solid coffee-table book has slick design inside and out, with plenty of well-presented images and attention to detail.

BILL HAMMOND: JINGLE JANGLE MORNING, Jennifer Hay et al

This book has one distinctive feature that differentiates it from the other coffee-table art books I have seen: its jacket doubles as a poster but, rather than the poster image being on the inside of the jacket, the poster has been folded so that it creates the jacket cover, complete with title. This is an appealing concept, as the purchaser gets a ‘free’ print of Hammond’s Jingle Jangle Morning to hang on their wall and accompany the book. 

RADICAL SKUBIC JEWELRY

This jewelry art book’s deconstructed design is interesting, but has a negative effect on its presentation of images and heavy text.

THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN, Gavin Bishop

This board book for toddlers is based on a traditional nursery rhyme, illustrated by Gavin Bishop.

The book’s construction is typical for books aimed at this demographic: square, chunky, small enough for the toddler to turn the thick pages without help, durable enough to withstand enthusiastic gnawing. The corners not attached to the spine are rounded, preventing their use as eye-poking devices and reducing the risk of them becoming worn and frayed over time. 

THE CRAFTSMAN, Richard Sennett

What an interesting cover! Difficult to read, but certainly eye-catching. Luckily, you only need to read one of the pencils to discover the title and author – unless you read the black one on the left first, which tells you the publisher, or the yellow one two to the right, which lets you know that Boyd Tonkin of the Independent considers the book ‘a masterpiece’.

BRIEFCASE, John Adams

This slim book of poetry by Auckland judge and poet John Adams marries text and design to create a pleasing whole.

The intentions post

Disclaimer: I am probably not going to literally dismember any books for this blog. It's not that I haven't tried. It's just that every attempt has ended in me owning more books, not less, and I don't see that changing any time soon - no matter how many copies of Pride and Prejudice I own (never enough, especially as none of them actually made it to my current flat).

No - this blog is a bit more abstract. Rather than take a scalpel to my library, I'm going to take a, erm, brain-scalpel to book design. Cover art, typefaces, paper stock, layout - innards and outards, the lot. I'll be looking at design trends across the world and over the years, discussing trends, and possibly talking a bit too much about how much I appr

In the meantime, Brian Dettman, as I'm sure half the Internet knows by now, really has been slicing up some books:

Dettman's work is consistently fantastic, but I particularly love this one because it looks like a caterpillar. And I think we can all agree that if the world needs more of anything, it's caterpillar-books. Look at its little not-a-face! Awww.

See Brian Dettman's website for more of his work.