PRINTCast: The PRINT Podcast Studio is a curated collection of cutting-edge podcasts we love about design, creativity, branding, books, and further subjects afield. Inside Front Cover is a show hosted by Sam Aquillano about the design process behind creating the cover for his forthcoming book about launching and growing Design Museum Everywhere.
In episode 3 of Inside Front Cover, host Sam Aquillano visits Proportion Design’s office again, this time to go through market comps and competition. Proportion’s Co-Founders, Blake Goodwin and Paul Reiss, start by sharing and discussing 13 books they believe are direct and adjacent competitors to Sam’s forthcoming book, and they chart these on a matrix across busy versus clean, and illustrative versus typographic.
Then the team shares 55 books deemed “comps” or comparables— books that somewhat align with mission, scope, content, and audience to gain inspiration from the marketplace. Proportion organized these books into 4 categories: Biographical/Founding, Classic Textbook, Bold Typographic, and Sketches/Lines/Icons/Arrows. They discuss what elements are working and not working in regards to Sam’s book— identifying 5 of those 55 that they feel have elements worth exploring.
The team wraps up the session by showing and talking about 60 books covering a range of design elements to gauge Sam’s reactions and see if any of these books inspire directions that might differentiate the look of this book from the competition.
Listen in the player above or check it out on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Catch up with Episode 1 here and Episode 2 here.
