NATALIE SMITH ///

Natalie Smith, from University of Chicago Press, has some wonderful covers. I always love seeing what Chicago does.

BREAD + BUTTER ///

I found out about the Bread + Butter Shop in a strange way. It started with my boss referring me to Melville House Publishing, an independent publisher in Brooklyn (via Hoboken) that has some really great cover designs. I had seen a few of their award-winning covers, but had failed to take a look at their entire catalogue. A Wikipedia entry for the publisher mentioned their current art directors: Kelly Blair and Carol Hayes, who are 2/3 of Bread + Butter in their spare time. Really though, how much spare time do you have after art directing (awesome) covers, creating illustrations for the NY Times, and co-authoring a book on objects with unexpected significance? Here’s a small sample of that book on Design Observer.

My Book Cover in the NY Times

Just found out that a book I did the cover for was reviewed in the Holiday Gift Guide/Books section of the NY Times! It printed in the NYC edition on November 28th, 2008 so if anyone out there has a copy please let me know. The book is “BLACK: the History of a Color” by Michel Pastoureau.

Philosophy Series

I’m currently working on a design for a series of books in philosophy. The series will have around 20 titles and is tentatively called Foundations of 21st Century Philosophy. While I’m working on the jackets/covers my Art Director will be designing the interiors. Here are some sketches I started out with…we’re going with the one in the bottom right, which I’ll now use to create a design lexicon (look/feel/vocabulary) for the entire series. I think it’s going to turn out pretty cool and we’re approaching it as more of a package design (or even branding) project, really taking into account how each book will play a specific role in the overall effect of the design.

Politics of Womens Rights in Iran ///

This is a piece i did upon request as a potential book cover, but has been adapted to season 4 for Jamie Marx. Expressing the struggle and tender subject of womens rights in Iran… Get up….

New book cover

This book cover is the result of some experimenting with new techniques (new to me at least!) in Photoshop. I greatly prefer Illustrator, so I don’t have the greatest confidence in my Photoshop abilities. I simply placed multiple side profiles of women and women on top of using an overlay and then created a bitmap with a halftone pattern comprised of diagonal lines. Then I placed the black & white bitmap on top of the original color composite.

The more miraculous part was that the visual seemed somewhat appropriate for a book I was assigned about psychological trauma and victimhood in regards to terrorism. I presented it and it was approved!