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.

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

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.

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.