Over In Print, we’ve put up a classic piece from last year: book cover designers such as Paul Buckley, John Gall, and Peter Mendelsund talk about their favorite designs that were rejected and never used. Carol Devine Carson’s favorite was a 2001 novel called Dogwalker:
Outside the office of Carol Devine Carson, art director for Knopf, is agallery of also-rans—mocked-up copies of books by Alice Munro, ToniMorrison, and others, all with killed covers. The one closest toCarson’s heart is for Arthur Bradford’s Dogwalker(2001), a collection of stories with a cast of half-pet, half-personmutants. Carson came up with a cheerful baby-puppy hybrid.
“I showed itto [Bradford’s] editor,” says Carson, “and the reaction was reallyfunny, a sort of ‘Eek!’ She said, ‘It’s kind of repulsive, it’s kind ofscary, but it’s kind of charming.’ So I thought it stood a chance.”Bradford admired the cover’s “strangeness and creativity,” he says, but“something about that dog-baby’s face struck me as sinister andmocking.”
Read the rest Also in home news, don’t forget that our big webcast with Pangea Organics is at 4pm today. Joshua Onysko, Pangea’s owner, and Josh Ivy, the company’s leaddesigner, take sustainable packaging to a whole new level. Not only arethe boxes for their soaps and gift sets completely biodegradable—youcan actually plant one, and grow a tree! Colorado Blue Spruce Seeds areembedded in each box. Sign up now while there’s still room!
And from elsewhere around the web:
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Maira Kalman and Christoph Niemann are doing some of the most consistent visual storytelling you’ll find anywhere.
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How Mad Men, the show about traditional advertising, found Eight O’Clock Coffee, which does no traditional advertising, on Twitter.
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Some terrific photographs of the Far East from Seamus Murphy.
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And Wooster Collective has some great photos of street art crossword puzzles in the Ukraine: “In the day time, the puzzle is empty. But at night special florescent lights come on, and the answers in the puzzle become visible.”
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An interview with some of the infographic designers at Good: Phil Lubliner (profiled in Print as 2008 New Visual Artist) and Thomas Porostocky (2007). [TMN]
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Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Inherent Vice, is officially out today. There’s an awesome (though sadly out-of-date) collection of cover art on his site. The first U.S. edition of V., by Ismar David, is especially memorable.