Welcome to Tui's book design scrapbook!

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Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to my design-scrapbook-blog-project. What is this? It's a scrapbook blog. I photocopy and scan and crop and upload pieces of book design that I like and dislike and am just kind of meh about. Then I talk about them a little bit. I am interested in design from a usability perspective; I like design to reflect and be respectful of content and audience; and I like variety. I also think jacket design should be commercial. Sometimes that just means beautiful; other times it means positioning a book clearly within its genre. How do I get around? There are lots of ways to read me. You can start at the top and scroll down, working backwards through time. Alternatively, you could start at my first post and go through the posts one by one - you can use the forward and backward arrows at the bottom left of each post to do this. You can also use tags, either by checking out the sidebar on the left of each page, or from the tags page. My tags are organised by kind of book and by the type of page I'm discussing. OMG! How do I contact the maintainer? My telepathy reception is spotty so I recommend email: tui.head(at)gmail(dot)com. You can also leave a comment on any entry. Why is this a community and not a personal journal? Because I wanted to be able to manage it easily. To all intents and purposes this Dreamwidth community functions as a personal journal. Membership will remain closed indefinitely.

Cover talk

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Let's talk about covers! Specifically, let's compare different editions. In this post, bibliographic data is all for the first cover posted, because that'll be the one I own. ( read more )

The Vegetarian Adventure

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Rowan Bishop & Sue Carruthers. The Vegetarian Adventure Cook Book: Menus from Home and Abroad. Lower Hutt: Mills Publications, 1988. No design info. Collected 30 July. I sat down to trash this design, but I found that it had really grown on me. What I like about it is that it has a really distinct sense of the time it was written, while still being legible, useful, and even attractive twenty years later. (Also, remember when a cookbook cost $20?) Paperback. ( read more )

So Many Worlds (giant yellow book tyvm!)

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Dieter Bachman & Daniel Schwartz. So Many Worlds: A Photographic Record of Our Time. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Design by Adam Hay. Collected July 29 30 With this deceptively simple book, it's all about yellow! ( read more )

Astronomy: Cambridge Illustrated History

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Ed. Michael Hoskin. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Design by Stuart Macready and various others. Collected 30 July Apologies for the scans for this one, guys, it's a big heavy book and difficult to get on the glass. Hardback, gloss laminated pages, four colours throughout.( read more )

Proud to Nurse

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Mary Ellen O'Connor. Freed to Care, Proud to Nurse: 100 Years of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation. Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2010. Design is likely in-house. Collected 30 July This new hardcover book is heavy on the images, many of which are pretty neat, and it usually does a good job of showcasing them. However, on the whole the design gives me the feeling of being almost-but-not-quite great. ( read more )

Dictionary talk!

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Checking out physical and online dictionaries! We were asked to explore some differences between using physical and online reference works, and I picked dictionaries because I had some quirky ones. ( read more )

The Box of Stars

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Catherine Tennant. The Box of Stars: A Practical Guide to the Night Sky and to its Myths and Legends. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. Design by Terry Jeavons. Cards originally hand-painted by "a lady", in 1825. The Box of Stars is unusual in that it is really a box - a small, blue, beautifully decorated box, which contains a small book and a set of cards. The cards are illuminated maps of constellations, originally created in the early nineteenth century; the book explains what they mean and how to use the cards to learn more about the modern night sky. All in all, it is a wonderful package. ( read more )

Two Graphic Novels

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Frank Miller (script & pencils), Klaus Janson (inks), Lynn Varley (colorist). Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 1986. New York: DC Comics, 2002. Collected June 14 Striking cover, shame about the sticker placement! Standard comic book trade paperback format, glossy cover, thin four-colour pages. ( read more ) Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H Papadimitriou, writers; Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, artists. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. July 1 Logicomix, designed for a broader audience than the usual graphic novel (as indicated by the various intellectual endorsements on the back cover), is somewhat more up-market in construction and in stock. The cover is a matte-laminate card (matte is almost unheard of in comics trade paperbacks) with spot gloss on titles and images, it has large full-page flaps, and the internal stock is slightly heavier than that of The Dark Knight Returns above. ( read more )

Making Stuff

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Making Stuff: An Alternative Craft Book. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006. Designed by David Ottley, Chris Turnbull, and Angela Osgerby. Collected 24 July Making Stuff is a pretty commercial book clearly designed to take advantage of one particular market. It isn't especially well-made and is clearly aimed at beginner crafters - no particular skill in any one craft is needed to make any of the projects in this book, so for me as a good knitter and an uncertain everything else-er I'm not sure how much of a wise purchase it is. However, it is a book that definitely knows its market, and I think its design is very coherent in that respect. ( read more )

Knitting Rules!

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Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. Knitting Rules. Massachusetts: Storey Publishing, 2006. Design by Mary Velgos and others. Illustrations by Diana Marye Huff. Collected June 14 Knitting Rules is a book of knitting tips and knitting humour in a fairly ordinary paperback with a fairly flimsy glossy cover and a standard white book stock. I don't really like the cover, but it's pretty to the point: a woman, (the author, who is a well-known knitter and author)knitting and dropping a ball of wool, with quirky typography and an exclamation mark. It might not be the world's greatest design, but it gets the job done. However, unusually, the book was printed in a maroon ink rather than in black. The first time I took notes on this book I found the entire concept so offensive that I fairly trashed it! However, on review, I don't feel quite so strongly. (For some reason, this text mostly scanned as black and white - take my word for it, it's maroon.) ( read more )

New Zealand Play Series Presents

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Sarah Delahunty. Two Plays. Wellington: Playmarket, 2009. Cover by Sorelle Cansion and Sean McGarry; John Vakidis. Tzigane. Wellington: Playmarket, 2008. Cover by Sorelle Cansino; Gary Henderson. Three Plays. Wellington: Playmarket, 2007. Cover by Sorelle Palmer. All collected 14 July Playmarket presents awesome series design in its New Zealand playwrights series. ( read more )