Julia Hasting: The Unusual Book Designer
Q: What’s a book designer’s dream job? A: To be tasked with making beautiful illustrated books employing unusual formats and treatments, and hey, don’t worry about the budget. As a young freelance designer in Karlsruhe, Germany, Julia Hasting wasn’t even sure she wanted to visit London in 1998. She went in search of inspiration and landed a design […]
First Impressions
Each year, first-year Visual Communication students from the University of Technology Sydney are briefed to design a series of B-format book covers. Students choose a set of books from one of three literary genres: popular science, postcolonial fiction or science fiction. The brief includes three books in each set (which change annually to avoid feedback-fatigue […]
Meet Carla Sy, New Zealand’s Young Designer of the Year
Auckland-based designer Carla Sy won the Publishers Association of New Zealand (PANZ) Young Designer of the Year Award in 2015. Carla will be in Sydney next week undertaking a professional development placement with Matt Stanton and the HarperCollins Australia design team. Ahead of her visit to Australia, Miriam Rosenbloom, ABDA’s vice president and one of the […]
The Mindless Colouring Book
A post by illustrator and cartoonist Oslo Davis Last year I devised and drew This Annoying Life – A Mindless Colouring Book for the Highly Stressed. Major part piss-take, minor part colouring book. It features 45 or so line drawings depicting scenes of everyday angst. Hitting your shin on a tow bar. Being accosted […]
Re-designing History
A post by ABDA member Peter Long When I was a graphic design student at Swinburne in the early 1980s, I spent a lot of time in the library. I don’t know where everyone else was, but I was in the library. They had lots of old Graphis Annuals stretching back through the seventies, even […]
The Placement of the Sun
A post by ABDA member Kåre Martens Being a Norwegian living in Australia but co-owning a business with mainly Scandinavian clients I must have flown between the two countries at least 40 times over the last 17 years. Apart from noticing via the in-flight entertainment systems that Adam Sandler’s career is going nowhere there is something else […]
Book Designer, Scholastic Australia
Scholastic Australia is seeking a talented designer to work on its award-winning range of picture books, licensed publishing, fiction and non-fiction titles as part of its dedicated publishing team based in Lindfield, Sydney. The successful applicant will have excellent design skills, be proficient with the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of products and have a sound […]
Graphic Designer (Print and Digital), Macmillan Education
Macmillan Education is looking for a graphic designer to join its busy production team in South Yarra, Melbourne. The designer will be working predominantly (though not exclusively) on designs for new primary front list titles, both print and digital. To be successful in this role you must have all the prerequisites: strong conceptual design and typographic […]
We Need to Talk About Bowie
We are all talking about Bowie. This morning, the day after the news of his death, book designer Jessica Horrocks at Text sent me her homage-parody. With fine instincts she picked on the film tie-in edition of Lionel Shriver’s celebrated bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Tilda Swinton, who features in the film and on […]
Cover Me Christmas: Books I Want To Get (or Give) for the Holidays
It’s the holiday season again and we’re thinking of family and food, holidays and celebrations. Book people, as we know, love to receive books, and the handsomer the package the better. So we are asked ABDA members the question: “What books do you want to get and give because of how it looks?” Here are […]
My Book Design Gateway Drug: Milton Charles and the Covers of V.C. Andrews
A post by ABDA member Miriam Rosenbloom It was 1989 and I was mooching about in the Woodend library – wandering the aisles, feet lazily sparking static on the carpet tiles – when a paperback on the shelf flickered in the light. Shades of red foil surrounded a tiny girl’s face only to reveal, upon […]
Spine Magazine is Seeking Submissions
UK-based Spine Magazine is currently looking for book designs to feature in its fourth issue. According to the magazine’s founder Emma Hardy “book cover designers have a tough job; they have to juggle author/publisher politics, understand a wide range of topics and be extremely versatile in their design approaches. One day they might be working purely with […]