Except maybe herring. But for some reason nobody seems to make Valentine’s Day cards involving –

– Oh! Well. Good.

More in this Flickr set of vintage Valentine’s Day cards.

These books are here for an essential structural purpose. They are NOT for sale.

Happy by Alex Lemon, designed by Rex Bonomelli.

From Book Covers Anonymous:

The black portion of the cover is actually the jacket – a bellyband. The yellow portion is printed directly on the case. This is a memoir by a star college baseball player nicknamed Happy who [suffers] a stroke and two subsequent brain bleeds.

By graphic designer and illustrator Igor Udushlivy.
See the full set.

Maybe impractical in this execution (the designs would be too impoverished when the bookmarks weren’t carefully in place) but still, fun and interesting, and I bet there’s interesting things you could do designing bookmarks for specific titles. A rasher of bacon for Eating Animals, maybe – keep Stephen Colbert happy.

By illustrator Lehel Kovács, see the rest of the set on Flickr.

The Day of the Dolphin at Wikipedia, at IMDB.

Neither a critical or commercial success on its release in 1973 (six years after Mike Nichols directed The Graduate, and two after George C. Scott turned down the Best Actor Oscar for Patton), this tale of espionage and talking dolphins was originally going to be directed by Roman Polanski: he was scouting for locations for the film when his wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by the Manson Family.

The Rethink Scholarship is an $18,000 scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College’s Communication and Ideation Design program. The winner will also receive a 3-month internship with Rethink.

Reminds me of:

ABC3D on Youtube, on Amazon.

In a cell clinging to his blanket, the lights always on, with no windows or way to know the time, having been denied human contact for months, at the tail end of his senses, secretly observed talking to people who aren’t there: this is the state of Al-Qahtani when his hood is removed in the interrogation booth on November 23.

This is his state before the log begins, before it records: Detainee states he’s on hunger strike, asks to pray and is refused, The Detainee began to cry, agreed to drink water in return for being allowed to pray, Medical personnel checked vital signs.

Before Detainee was informed that we would not let him die, wrap was put on detainee’s feet to combat the swelling, The detainee bent over and bit the IV tube completely in two …

The Humbling by Philip Roth, designed by Milton Glaser.

And I say that even with a horse in the running on The Book Design Review’s rather more thorough round-up of the year.

(Actually it’s gray318’s horse, but I still like to brush its locks and feed it sugarcubes.)

Alternate covers for an issue of The New York Times Magazine and a spread, taken from ‘Behind The New York Times Magazine’s Redesign with DD Arem Duplessis’ at The Society of Publication Designers blog Grids.

They’re by Tomer Hanuka for the wine makers Some Young Punks. That’s Tomer Hanuka who you may know as being no slob with a book cover:

]]> http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/2009/12/tomer-hanuka-wine-labels/feed/ 1 http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/2009/12/tomer-hanuka-wine-labels/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/greaterthanorequalto/~3/gDxrVPi-GRI/ http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/2009/12/black-dynamite-poster/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:13:13 +0000 Alan Trotter http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/?p=1136 You’re a spoof! A joke! Your poster should be a half-bright pastiche. Not a legitimate, even kind of stunning piece of work in its own right.

Oh well.

Official trailer on YouTube.

(via The Font Feed)

Poster from cover of Moby Dick by Herman Melville, art by Tony Millionaire

Poster from cover of White Noise by Don Delillo, art by Michael Cho, design by Paul Buckley

Then the very delightful design blog Kitsune Noir has begun the Kitsune Noir Poster Club by asking five artists to produce a poster based on a book they love. The results of which include another take on Moby Dick:

Poster inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, by Mark Weaver

But I think my two favourites are these, coming from opposite ends of the austerity scale:

Poster inspired by David Foster Wallace’s Infinte Jest, by Cody Hoyt

Poster inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, by Jez Burrows

The other two titles are Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

And then there’s Penguin designer and, more importantly, ≥ regular Stefanie Posavec, who has a print at 20x200. It’s based on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, and uses the same technique to visualize the text as she’s used before for On the Road.

Walter Benjamin: A Literary Organism Analysis print, by Stefanie Posavec

I am wishing I had more money right now.

Guys.

Send me money.

But then it’s already been kind of a strange day on the internet for me.

On Monday, the site got its first real burst of attention, getting linked by Kottke (thanks to Ben Pieratt) and from there finding it’s way to Metafilter. And then last night Boing Boing posted about it. From having daily visits in the low double digits and about the same number of followers on Twitter, in the last few days it’s had more than 12,000 visits, and it’s now got more than 400 followers on Twitter and another couple of hundred for the RSS feed. Those are numbers that plenty of big sites could laugh off, but it’s definitely good news for something like this, and I’m very happy about it. (What will be interesting will be to see how quickly and how sharply people on Twitter stop following the site. It’s not a particularly pleasant experience to follow, and I wouldn’t blame anybody.)

Then today, something I’d written went up at the McSweeney’s website – an article titled ‘I am locking the Wikipedia article on our sex life’.

So there you go, whether you want to think about the horrendous torture policies of the Bush administration and the damage they’ve done to human lives and to the course of justice in the war of terror, or you just want jokes about vaginas, I’ve got you covered.

And thank you for visiting the web’s first books/design/torture/sex comedy blog.

I’d read any of these in a shot. The sad robots! The inexplicable miniature elephant and its suave ape owner! The charming alien tourist breaking the 4th wall! No wonder science fiction magazines used to cram superlatives into their titles – they earned ’em.

But Dzama’s imaginatively eerie style (if his art was in a horror film, it would be an artful crayon drawing by a haunted child that makes the parents wonder just what the hell is wrong with their kid) has been better captured on video elsewhere – in this Department of Eagles video for ‘No One Does It Like You’, which the artist himself co-directed with Patrick Daughters:

(Dzama also, Wikipedia tells me, contributed to this Bob Dylan music video ‘When the Deal Goes Down’, but his contribution seems to come only at the end, by which time it may be competing for the viewer with the creeping approach of yawns and sleep.)

If you like Dzama’s style, McSweeney’s publish a collection of his work called The Berliner Ensemble Thanks You All, which is as beautiful and composed of as many small wonders of unorthodox formatting as you might hope from a McSweeney’s book.

But N.A.S.A. the music project (standing for North America South America, and fronted by Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon) have been turning out some of the best music videos ever made, so it’s hard to say which is now my favourite NASA. Oh wait, did the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ever do a song with Tom Waits? No? Then fuck them.

And it turns out Tom’s been animated before – he was rotoscoped for a 1978 short called Tom Waits for No One, singing ‘The One that Got Away’ (the film even won an Oscar for Scientific and Technical Achievement).

And there’s some of the original footage on YouTube, before the animators drew over it:

And! here’s a video directed by Anders Lövgren that animates the lyrics to the Waits’ song ‘Come On Up to the House’ in hand-drawn type. Stick with it – it’s a simple idea, but so well done it becomes hypnotic instead of tedious. (It doesn’t hurt that it’s a great song.)

(Thanks to my friend Stephen for letting me know about Tom Waits for No One; ‘Come On Up to the House’ video via The Font Feed. It should be noted that despite his being a figure of beer-slurring cigarette-smoking louche male disintegration, I feel for Tom Waits roughly what six-year-old girls feel for pink.)

I didn’t realise that as well as writing genre-defining classics like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, Wells has also been called the father of miniature war gaming.

He wrote two books, Floor Games and Little Wars (what a title), of rules and theory for playing games with children’s toys and toy soldiers. Little Wars includes a description of a game from the point of view of a caracitural general relating it as a battle from his storied past, beginning:

… suddenly your author changes. He changes into what perhaps he might have been—under different circumstances. His inky fingers become large, manly hands, his drooping scholastic back stiffens, his elbows go out, his etiolated complexion corrugates and darkens, his moustaches increase and grow and spread, and curl up horribly; a large, red scar, a sabre cut, grows lurid over one eye. He expands—all over he expands. He clears his throat startlingly, lugs at the still growing ends of his moustache, and says, with just a faint and fading doubt in his voice as to whether he can do it, “Yas, Sir!”

I don’t know anything about war games. (I am a nerd, but not that kind of nerd.) But I like the fact that Wells’ game makes use of spring-loaded cannons firing wooden cylinders. In Little Wars he says, ‘Whenever possible, death should be by actual gun- and rifle-fire and not by computation. Things should happen, and not be decided.’

If you’ve read Infinte Jest, that might make you think of nuclear-annihilation-and-tennis game Eschaton (or it did me, anyway), which similarly operates with real-world actions (tennis ball lobs) impacting on the accepted pretense of a game world (nuclear explosions). Or at least it operates until debate (does real world snow dictate game-world snow?) becomes violence and the end of play.