Student Work: Dust Jacket Redesign, Peter Pekaski and Gabriela Ramirez

I'm teaching Book & Magazine Design this semester, and had to share some terrific dust jackets by my students.

The assignment was to do an "observe and report" on a bookstore, and come back with two sketches of book covers they found in their bookstore—ones that caught their attention. Once back in class, they chose one of the covers to redesign. Then...to expand that cover into a full dust jacket complete with back cover, spine, and flaps.

Peter Pekalski chose to redesign Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Instead of relying on the hard-boiled/noir comic book image, he chose to go to an all-type solution, knocking the type out over an image of a face.

Here's the original, from the bookstore (designer?):

And here's Peter's redesign.

If you look closely (click on the image for a larger view), you can see that he also extended the face onto the flap, so you get a hint of an ear. He also played with the subtitle type, splitting it and repositioning it so it's no longer smooth—it's been manipulated. Click here to see more of Peter's work.

The redesign reminds me a bit of an inverse version of Jamie Keenan's terrific design for Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

Shape Type, or Designing Typefaces is Trickier than you even thought

Another interesting typography game from the brilliant minds who created The Kerning Game.
Meet The Shape Type Game, where you try and match up type designs. Tricky, tricky!

A bad type choice

Although it does say a lot about the owner, in its own way.

Sans avec personality?

Weren't we just discussing finding sans serif typefaces with personality? And from our mouths to God's ear, an email from Hoefler & Frere-Jones appeared in my mailbox with their Ideal Sans, just the thing with a bit of personality!

And as always, the gentlemen over at H&FJ show off their vocabulary . . .

Flared stems:

Canted gestures (with upward thrust!):

*If nothing else, these descriptions would make excellent album titles for some early '70's prog-rock band.

Good JuJu

This pre-Valentine squib is inspired by a foray into the pantry to clean out ancient treats (unconsumed for a year and exhumed to avoid waste). The gummy hearts are a product (and a train wreck of a package) of Mayfair Sales, Buffalo, NY. A shallow search for Mayfair's site led me to a post by a gent named Michael Marcus, who normally posts about publishing, but reminisced about Jan/Feb candies.

But I digress. The heart of this post is the typography for "Mayfair." Can you name the face? A hint: I found its name in Photolettering's One Line Manual of Styles, one of the now-vintage type books on BTD's shelves. BTW, you could give your students an interesting sidebar discussion about Art Nouveau-inspired funky faces from the ______by luminaries such as______________. Extra points and picas for naming the the outlined "JuJu!"

* I first heard the term "good juju" from Amy D, originally from New Orleans, who worked at BTD in the early 1990s. Valentine candy could be "good juju"—i.e. a fetish or some sort of toy or magic to ensure romance. It's a stretch, but so's eating those gummy hearts!