Hasta La Ideas

Barnes and Noble has announced that it is jumping into the online audio book market with its launch of Barnes and Noble Audiobooks.

Most of the books are between $10 and $20 per download, and they already have more than 10,000 titles for sale. The new service will compete with Audible, iTunes, and Amazon for your audio book dollars. The audio books will play on any device that supports MP3s, like an iPod, your computer, or a Kindle.

If you’re looking for ways to expand your book collection but without bringing more physical books into your home, be sure to give audio books a try.

(via Publishers Weekly)

As part of its 80th anniversary celebrations (that we previously blogged about here), Faber & Faber is publishing an extensive series of Samuel Beckett’s works, including 18 novels, plays and short stories, to appear over the next two years. The typographic covers for the series were commissioned by Faber’s senior designer, Miriam Rosenbloom, and designed by London-based studio A2/SW/HK…

According to Rosenbloom, the project has taken the best part of a year from concept to completion, with the designers working closely with the Beckett estate as well as Faber’s in-house Arts team.

“Our starting point was some of the 1960s Beckett covers from the Faber archive,” Rosenbloom explains, “which take a bold typographic approach.

“A2 seemed like the perfect match for the series; they are renowned for their typographic work and have a wonderful ability to work with historical reference while always remaining true to their individual style.”

Each cover features a bespoke font that comes in four weights, while the book’s titles runs vertically to allow for the use of large point sizes.

“A neutral grey background was selected as a counterpoint to the special Pantone colours chosen for each of the 18 titles,” explains A2’s Scott Williams.

“This choice is, in part, a playful reference to Beckett’s directive that his gravestone be ‘any colour, so long as it’s grey’.”

The end result allows for a playful variety in the sizing and layout of the titles, the length of which range from one single word to several phrases, as in the case of the collected editions.

“This allows for some unusual word breaks and so the titles bleed off the edge of the page giving an energy and tension to the design,” adds Rosenbloom. “The colour palette is fresh and complements this striking and type-led series design.”

The first five volumes in the series are set to be published in May by Faber & Faber.

On May 6th, Stanford’s d.school is hosting a book launch lecture and reception for Dev Patnaik’s Wired to Care. The book explores the role of empathy and human-centric design principles for driving successful business practice and strategy. Dev Patnaik is an alum of the Stanford Product Design program, founder/principal at Jump Associates, and adjunct professor at Stanford University. I had the pleasure of being in his Needfinding class… one of the results of this class included a drum machine for dogs using the Arduino platform, some piezoelectric sensors, Ardrumo, Garage Band, a MIDI library, and a speaker output. All controlled by a border collie.

RSVP for the launch by May 4th. Lecture and reception at the d.school from 7:00-9:00pm on May 6th.

London-based design studio Airside celebrates its tenth year of business this year by self-publishing Airside by Airside, a 296-page hardback tome choc full of images of the projects that have not only paid the bills at Airside HQ but have shaped the company.

This is not your typical studio monograph. Dip into the text on any given page and it becomes clear that the intention is not just to show off the work created since the company’s inception in 1999, but also to use the book as a means to contextualise the work within the story of the company’s development…

“When we first talked about doing a book I was very keen that it had something of worth in the narrative,” explains Fred Deakin, who, along with Nat Hunter and Alex Maclean originally set up the company back in 1999. “I was very conscious that I wanted to do something where the narrative would be as interesting as the images. I’ve got loads of design books where I haven’t actually got round to reading the text but if you chose to read ours, I felt really strongly that it needed to be something that would give an insight into why the work was produced and the context and the culture in which the work was produced.”

The book’s hard cover favours pattern over any informational text (rather like a Lemon Jelly record sleeve) – a removable sticker carries the info. Inside, the first thing you notice is that the text on each page is both in English and in Japanese. “It’s partly because of Lemon Jelly,” explains Deakin, referring to the band which he runs along­side the design studio. “The Japanese public are so design literate that, when we first went out there, almost more of them had heard of Airside than had heard of Lemon Jelly, which was quite a revelation. We’ve done a lot of work now in Japan and while I wouldn’t say we’re big there, we’ve got an aware­ness – we’ve done lectures and we’ve had exhibitions in Japan and we’ve all got a real love for the culture. Our Japanese agent suggested the dual narrative and I really like it, it looks really nice. I think it gives the book more weight, more traction.”

This dual narrative that runs throughout the book tells the story of Airside in detail.

“I guess we were trying to do three things with the book,” says Deakin. “We were trying to show off the work that we’re very proud of, but we also wanted to show people how Airside happened because it’s been quite an unusual process. We were very lucky and we took very firm decisions about certain things that we weren’t going to fuck with so I wanted to show that, to make that explicit because that is part of the work really. The values and processes that created each piece of work are crucial, I think, to giving the book that deeper insight which is what I was hoping the people that bought the book might want. The third reason would be that if you are about to set up your own design company then it’s very much a kind of case study, a ‘how to’. If you want to set up a company like Airside then this is exactly what we did, here are our mistakes, here are our successes, this is what we’re proud of, this is what we’re not proud of. We consciously tried to put in the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. I think we expose ourselves really extensively over the course of the narrative – that’s the intention anyway.”

Read the full version of this article in the current issue of CR. Airside by Airside, £35, is available now from airsideshop.com

Long before there were hi-res laser printers in every design firm and PDF specimens on every foundry website, typographers discovered, compared, and selected type using specimen books.

There is too much separation from the display to the printed page for a designer to see how the curves, the straights, and the joins truly interact. The best way to review and analyze the utility of a typeface is through viewing the samples in print. Nothing can replace this.

To this end, “FontBook” is a type reference worth much more than its weight in gold. And it weighs a lot! (More than six-and-a-half pounds, in fact.)

Some might say, “but it’s a book and it can’t be updated.” True. Containing font releases up to 2006, “FontBook” is best used in conjunction with FontShop.com and other online vendors for a more current view of what’s available. But the book offers insight not found online, such as the “see also” cross-references, and offset printed samples complete enough to really give a good idea of what you’ll get when you go to press.

This comprehensive reference is curated, organized, and printed with loving and tender care — a vital tool for keeping things original and fresh for each client and project.

Tiffany Wardle de Sousa is a typographer living and working in San Jose, California. She earned her MA in the Theory and History of Typography at Reading. Active in the type community, Tiffany has written for several design publications and serves as a SOTA board member and Typophile moderator.