Archive for August, 2010
Look at this cool book cover….
I tried something new this month & hired an illustrator to design our next book cover.
For this project, I didn’t have any images to supply to the designer. All I had was a rather intimidating book title and a desire to have the words on the cover be loud and proud. (How’s that for a creative brief?)
As luck would have it, an old acquaintance happened to send me his latest newsletter and the moment I saw Bill’s newest Big Lewbowski posters:
I knew he was my man. (Lesson: self-promotion does work.)
Here’s the book cover Bill created for me. I love it so much it makes my eyes water.
Do you see the smiley face in the word “Good”? In my opinion, that’s one of the signs of great design: when there is an IDEA behind the pretty design. This smiley face was repeated in the running headers on the interior pages.
SAD UPDATE: This book was not picked up by a publisher. We thought it was a great concept, but the acquisition editors were not feeling the love.
But we rebounded well and sold the next book we pitched. The Call for Entry is now closed, but you can click here to learn more.
~Nancy Heinonen
Publications Director
Crescent Hill Books
A sneak peek inside The Big Book of Packaging
Although it won’t be in stores until Spring 2011, we’re busy designing the interior page layout for The Big Book of Packaging. (Can you think of anything more fun? We can’t.)
There will be five chapters: Food & Beverage, Health & Beauty, Home & Garden, Technical and Misc.
These chapters sound nice, don’t they? But – let’s be honest – that’s pretty standard stuff for a book on product packaging. Which is why we love designers. Because the folks at
Anderson Design Group (who design all of the books within the “Big Book” series) took our ho-hum chapter titles and turned them into something loud, proud and just plain fun. (And created a color scheme for each chapter at the same time.) So smart.
The largest chapter is Food & Beverage. In fact, we received twice as many submissions to the Food & Beverage chapter than any other. And a surprisingly high number of those submissions were for alcoholic beverage packaging (which made use long for the days when entrants had to ship us an actual sample.) Here are some sample pages:
There will also be 12 case studies in the book, like this one….
