Tag: Book cover

Books That Never Were: Quentin Tarantino Classics

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - Repertory, OmniculturalLeave a comment

Even though we’re arguably living in a time of unprecedented leaps in graphic design, that boundary-breaking often fails to trickle down to the book world. Like any other creative industry, book covers tend to group together by trends—now minimal, then not; and always the unspoken rule that genre fiction covers show people and more literary fiction does not.

In any case, freelance designer Sharm Murugiah had an awesome idea: Why not take the aesthetic of classic Penguin paperback covers from the 1950s and ’60s, with their standardized type treatments and focus on one or two iconic but abstract images, and see what would happen if he designed book covers for Quentin Tarantino films? This is what:

tarantino-covers

They all pretty much make sense, though it takes a minute to get some of the references (anybody remember the significance of Pop Tarts in a toaster for Pulp Fiction?).

(hat-tip to GalleyCat, once again)

Judging Books by Their Covers

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

To some extent, we all place judgments on a book’s contents based on the cover design. It’s inevitable and expected—if it wasn’t the case, then publishers would just print books with plain bindings with the titles laid out in sans-serif type. (Sometimes they do just that and it’s called minimalist, so go figure.)

Another pleasing aspect of book cover design is that they allow one to painlessly peruse the works of many authors without having to actually, you know, read anything.

To that end, the good folks at Jacket Copy put together a nifty gallery of some of their favorite new book covers. Some of the selections are less than inspired (the cover for Daniel Smith’s Monkey Mind seems far too obvious, for one), but at least three or four are nothing short of incredible.