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Acclaim or Blame, Magazine Cover Designs Show the Power of Print

Print Power

If I had the time, I think I would start a blog just to feature news about dramatic, controversial, catalytic, magazine cover designs. Just in the past recent weeks, the following covers have stirred up online interest:

  • The New York Post, well known for a penchant for crossing the line with cover headlines, angered many with a cover featuring a murdered Jewish real estate developer and the headline “Who Didn’t Want Him Dead”
  • The New Yorker captured both the pride and sorrow over the passing of Nelson Mandela with a moving and popular cover by artist Kadir Nelson.
  • Issues of body image and charges of “fat-shaming” were provoked when Elle magazine featured actress Melissa McCarthy on its Women in Hollywood issue in an oversized coat. A subsequent Mindy Kaling cover also got Elle more online heat as many considered the close-up photo of the actress to be an attempt to downplay her figure, where ‘skinnier’ stars received the full body treatment.
  • Just being on the first cover of the year seems to have been newsworthy as Seth Meyers graced the cover of Time this January, spawning a number of stories about his popularity and the future of late night viewing.

Major online news outlets often feature stories on current magazine or newspaper covers that either offend, surprise or inspire. Boston Magazine Cover Book covers certainly sell books, but magazine and newspaper covers can take extra advantage of the heat of the moment – energized by the immediacy of unfolding events in the news. Indeed, the editorial and design goal of these publications is that priceless viral buzz, and great designers are pushing the envelope of what the public will accept with dramatic and innovative images. While the power of such newsstand pulpits as the popular magazine or newspaper cover was obvious in the pre-digital era, the fact that a printed cover is news today points to a powerful quality of print. An online image can certainly stir emotions and controversy, but why is the printed image even more powerful? How has its authenticity and power crossed the digital divide to remain so effective today amid a sea of online images and news outlets?

 

Time Cover Mom EnoughOne aspect of print that helps to explain this is the physical, tactile nature of print. The image is not just flickering onto a computer or mobile screen, but exists as a hand-held, fixed object. Holding print feels more personal and immediate – otherwise, why would a printed card seem more personal than an e-vite? Why wouldn’t a college graduate just want their diploma sent over as a pdf? Print gives a physical existence to images and messages that digital media does not provide.

Print also turns up, often uninvited, in our daily lives. It is waiting for you at the grocery store checkout, it’s image and inherent message is talking to you from the airport newsstand, coffeehouse table, doctor’s office waiting room. That physical quality of print combined with concurrent digital, online exposure is the core of successful marketing today: integrated marketing that takes advantage of both newer AND older technology.

Obamas on New Yorker

Ink on paper, great photography or illustration and powerful design – these covers excite, enrage, encourage, offend, inspire and influence. And they certainly do sell. Check this link for a compilation of some of the most controversial covers of all time… or this compilation that shows how today’s controversies often fade very quickly to become “no big deal.”

For a superior article on the thought, design and evolution of magazine cover art and text, read this article at Salon.

 

ImageSmith is proud to be a printer in an exciting era of digital communication. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. They should also be able to work with you to solve any difficult prepress issues with your files. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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Explore the World’s Most Expensive Printed Book: The Bay Psalm Book

 

Fan of the long s? Then you should enjoy the finging the pfalmes from the most expensive book ever published. Read on for some interesting facts about this record-setting publication and how you can perufe every page:

Bay Psalm Book Preface

The Bay Psalm book, a small Psalter, holds two world records. It was the first book printed in British North America, of which only 11 are known to exist, and now it has sold at Sotheby’s in New York City, for the highest price ever.

  • The price? $14,165,000, which was actually lower than some pre-auction estimates that ranged as high as $30 million.
  • The new owner? David Rubenstein, entrepreneur and philanthropist, plans to generously lend the book to libraries and exhibits. Rubenstein also bought a copy of the Magna Carta in 2007 for $21 million.
  • The printer? This book was, amazingly, printed a mere 20 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock by Stephen Day, the first colonial American printer.
  • 1,700 copies were originally printed. Only 11 are known to still exist.
  • The previous highest price paid for a Bay Psalm book? $151,000 in 1947. At the time, that was also a record for a printed book. Quite an appreciation in value!
  • Sotheby’s website includes fascinating detail about the publisher, printer and the creation of the book, its many errors and other printing details. If you are a printer, you’ll find out all about everything from watermarks, hyphenation and typesetting to quartos, folios and financing.
  • Typos? Oh yes. Even at the time, the Bay Psalm book was criticized for its poor quality of printing and abundant errors. Misspellings, inverted commas instead of apostrophes, uneven inking…. nobody’s perfect, right? A critic, over 200 years ago, noted the book “abounds with typographical errors” and said the printer “must have been wholly unacquainted with punctuation.” (source)  Ouch.
  • Other firsts in 1640? The first Finnish university was founded in the city of Turku. The first European coffee house opened in Venice. Charles I (another first) was on the English throne.

And best of all… you can study every page of the Bay Psalm book online for free, courtesy of the Old South Church in Boston (the same church where Benjamin Franklin was baptized).

Digital Bay Psalm Book

 

 

 

ImageSmith is proud to be a printer in an exciting era of digital communication. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. They should also be able to work with you to solve any difficult prepress issues with your files. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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Posters: The Best of Fresh Graphic Design & Inspiration

 

Printed posters are a rich resource for design and marketing inspiration. Whether promoting events, movies, music, politics, product launches, sales promotions or mainly living online as with the recent explosion of info-graphics – the common thread here is great graphic design as a tool to capture attention, inform and inspire action. A quick walk through the shop this morning found three examples of poster art good enough to always want around:

Orange Peel: Smashing Pumpkins poster

In 2007, The Smashing Pumpkins reformed as a band after a 7 year hiatus with a nine show residency at The Orange Peel right here in Asheville, NC. This folded insert poster is a keeper – designed by printmafia.net.

 

Framed movie poster

A classic movie poster: Frank Capra’s 1934 film It Happened One Night.

 

Wide Format print

A wide format print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night serves as a backdrop behind my computer. With apologies to Van Gogh, even cluttered over it is a nice image to have around.

Accessible, inventive, designed to catch your eye and stir your emotions – great poster art can be found in museum collections or stapled to the nearest light pole on any street in your town. Great print collections of curated poster art are available, or browse online galleries when you’re in need of a creative boost. Below are a few resources we found inspiring:

  • A great overview of the history of the poster is at designhistory.org. This site divides the development of the poster into the following helpful categories: Early Broadsides, The French Poster Craze of 1880, Early European Illustrated Posters, Cubism Meets the Airbrush, The Photographic Poster, The Swiss Poster, American Posters of the 20th Century, and The Poster as Public Message. Makes you want to read more just from the titles, right?
  • You can read a great interview with Martijn F. Le Coultre, coauthor of A Century of Posters, and a leading poster collector/curator from Holland, over at Steven Heller’s blog. In October 2013, Le Coultre will be auctioning off a portion of his vast collection at Christie’s in London – the auction is titled “Graphic Masterworks: A Century of Design.” Take a minute to browse Christie’s Ecatalogue of the event for an overview of the scope of this collection which spans from the 1890s to 1988.
  • Josef Müller-Brockmann is coauthor of the 1971 seminal study of  the History of the Poster. Browse his own works over at designishistory.com, or on a Pinterest page devoted to his design.
  • For insight into the current, cutting-edge international poster scene, follow Rene Wanner’s Poster Page. This site hold a wealth of information on exhibitions (online and off), publications, links, news and events related to current poster design and graphic arts around the globe.

Wide format printing can take your poster designs to new sizes. Consider using your branded designs as wall or floor graphics for a huge impact. Digital print allows you to run small quantities at affordable prices, whereas in the past an offset run of a poster could be a much more expensive undertaking. Get inspired by the best of graphic design in poster art.

 

Consider the ways you can use inspired graphic design to market your small business. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing

. They should also be able to work with you to solve any difficult prepress issues with your files. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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Your Life… on Paper. The Power of Print.

 

From conception to expiration, paper and print are there at every important milestone in your life. Consider how print and paper record, accompany, educate, entertain, sustain and preserve your journey…

From Conception to Expiration

Print and Paper on the Journey of Life

 

Print Paper Life

Print and Paper

Recording the journey

(For some great insights into the value of paper in our culture, check out Domtar’s Paper because… campaign.)

ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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The John Lennon Letters: When Your Whole Life is on Paper

Lennon and Life on Paper

“I don’t keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don’t keep an archive. There’s something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays. “
– Tom Stoppard

 

Our lives on paper live on after we are gone. And if you are famous, every scrap of paper will be saved. A newly released collection of correspondence entitled The John Lennon Letters, edited by Lennon biographer Hunter Davies, contains over 400 pages of annotated correspondence from Lennon. (Hardcover, Little, Brown and Company,  list price 29.99) Most reviewers, however, note that practically all informative correspondence from Lennon had already been published, and Davies collection is being skewered by the critics as a “scraping of the bottom of the barrel” – an attempt to profit from anything written by the hand of the famous Beatle. Here is a painstakingly organized collection of letters, notes, post-its, postcards and paper scraps that seems in total to reveal very little others than mundane details of the former Beatles’ daily life and some not-so-flattering personal qualities. Reviewer Neil McCormick of The Telegraph says all we really learn about Lennon from this mountain of paper is: “Well, he couldn’t spell. He liked to doodle. And he had way too much spare time on his hands.”

Not exactly a glowing review. Often the correspondence of famous people, whether writers, musicians or politicians, contains a wealth of valuable insight and factual data about the person’s life, private thoughts, emotional state and philosophy of life. Successfully published collections include the letters of Emily Dickinson, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Richard Nixon… and a long list of works that have made many publishers very happy. In many cases, the only hard evidence we have of the private thoughts and feelings of these luminaries are in the archive of their journals, correspondence and personal papers.

However, we are leaving less and less of a paper trail through life. I wonder how in the digital age the role of paper will be different for the famous and infamous. Libraries and historical societies collect the correspondence of great thinkers, artists and politicians to serve as a primary source for further research. Even bar napkins, margin notes scribbled in books, newspaper clippings or anything bearing the subject’s handwriting is considered significant. But we put less of those things onto paper now than ever before. As our ‘footprints’ become increasingly virtual rather than physical, will these archives be data banks rather than stacks of paper? Will they catalogue blogs, emails, Twitter timelines, social media connections and text messages? Will people, wary of a lack of security when “writing” on a computer, still keep private handwritten journals or diaries?

And what about the rest of us? Are we leaving behind us a trail of thoughts, words and feelings that can be accumulated, researched and categorized without our control or input? The days of tossing the diary into the fire or shoving documents through a paper shredder to hide them for eternity seem to be gone. It will take newly refined skills in research and interpretation to assess the changing archive of information we leave behind as everything from our important documents to our shopping lists live on in computer memory.

 

Printer’s love paper. They also love the exciting new means of communication and marketing in an interconnected world. Your printer should be able to provide you with everything from encouragement all the way to the complete design, layout, copywriting, production, multi-purposing and distribution of your marketing outreach. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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Judging by the Cover: Memorable Book Cover Design

Judging a book by its cover is, in most cases, not a wise idea. But that old adage tends to diminish the importance that a cover plays in the interaction we have with a book. Judging by the cover may be unwise, but the impression a cover gives is very influential. The very mention of a book title can immediately brings to mind the image of its cover – that image becomes tied to the work, the author, the experience of reading the novel. Below are a few samples that got impressed into my memory over the years:

Book Cover Design

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The cover was painted by Francis Cugat, and it is said that Fitzgerald was so enamored with the work (which was completed before he had finished his novel) that he incorporated it into his story. Entitled “Celestial Eyes,” it is probably one of the most iconic and best known covers in publishing history.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute – Grace Paley

Edward Hopper’s “Compartment C, Car 293,” an oil painting of a young woman reading on a train, is a beautiful illustration for Gracy Paley’s collection of short stories, all set in New York. Once read, its hard not to see Paley’s narrator Faith as the woman on the train.

Salinger and Burgess

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
and The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

Such simliar covers for two very different books. The straightforward serif font in yellow on a classic crimson background reveals very little about the story inside Catcher in the Rye, yet is without a doubt inextricably tied to the story in the minds of millions of readers. Similarly Burgess’ futuristic distopian thriller could seem almost too bizarre to evoke in such a simple cover. Amazing how the simple skewing of the sans serif title diagonally across the orange background does the job wonderfully.

Examples of Book Cover Design

The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway and
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner

Two favorite novels of mine – but not what I would consider great book covers. In a way, they seem lazy – almost as if someone decided “Hey, this image will work, won’t it?” But these two images are what springs to mind whenever I hear these titles. Would a better choice have made for a better reading experience as well?

Book Cover Design from Classic Paintings

It’s interesting to notice the frequency with which classic paintings by great masters, that generally have nothing to do with the novel they are chosen to represent, are so often the choice for cover designs – and are an uncannily perfect fit. Penguin Classics is one publisher that relies heavily on this technique, finding classic portraits that seem to perfectly represent the character in a novel.

 

In my opinion, the best book cover designs often lean toward simplicity and minimalism. There is something powerful in sensing the feel or meaning of a novel’s theme in just the barest of images, or color, or font placement… a simple, eloquent cover that hints at the complexity within. (Regardless of the cover, if you haven’t read the novels above, do yourself a favor and check them out. All great reads.)

 

Rely on your printer for advice and direction in design and branding decisions. They have years of experience working with the entire gamut of design trends and tastes. If they can’t help you, they will know who can! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.