If you work somewhere within the book universe and have been thinking about updating your business card you might want to have a look at this recent post at Flavorwire highlighting some pretty nifty examples. Here's a taste: Business card for Kristin Partlo, a librarian at Carleton College’s Gould Library Miniature book-shaped cards for the publisher Paul & Marigold by Singapore design firm Foreign Policy Letterpress printed card for Olivia Waite by Boxcar Press A business card that doubles as a bookmark Pictured at top: Business card for Morgan Dillard by Tower of Babel Design More: Bookish Business Card Designs |...
Digital Treat: Thanks to Cambridge University we can now see inside the world’s first multicolored printed book
The book is called Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu, ‘Manual of Calligraphy and Painting’ and was first published in 1633 in Nanjing. The book is comprised of eight categories - birds, plums, orchids, bamboos, fruit, stones, ink drawings (round fans) and miscellany - and is illustrated by 50 different artists and calligraphers. It is the earliest known example of multicolor printing in the world: printed by the technique of polychrome xylography known asdouban invented and perfected by Hu Zhengyan 胡正言 (1584-1674). The method involves the use of multiple printing blocks which successively apply different coloured inks to the paper to reproduce...
Tub Lit: Kickstarter project offers waterproof books
The latest crowdsourced gem for the book crowd comes to us from Bibliobath. Thanks to Wing Weng and Jasper Jansen, a Dutch-Chinese couple based in Amsterdam, we finally have the waterproof book! They have 4 titles ready to go; a selection of short stories by Mark Twain, one of the selected poetry by W. B. Yeats, an edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth and a special Kickstarter-only edition of the Chinese classic The Art of War. The campaign just launched and the goal is to raise about $10,000 in the next month. Among the rewards are a couple geared...
Plant this Book
In 1968 Richard Brautigan published Please Plant This Book a collection of eight seed packets, each bearing an original poem related to its contents. Now almost 50 years later the Argentine publisher Pequeño Editor has unveiled a book that you can actually plant! The project is called Tree Book Tree and is designed to teach kids a little about the origin of paper books and sustainability. For its first release it took the popular children's book "Mi papá estuvo en la selva" (My dad was in the jungle), by Gusti Llimpi and Anne Decis, which is a true story about the...
New book chronicles the glory days of airline visuals
Once upon a time flying wasn't such a hassle. At its height the airline industry was the bees knees of postwar culture. From the mid-forties to the the mid-seventies flying was the way to go. The world got smaller as new opportunities and possibilities connected the four corners of the globe. It was also a time of some stunning graphic design. The posters and printed detritus that accompanied the golden age of air travel mark a high-spot in the history of advertising and corporate design. It is the graphic side of these times that M. C. Hühne chronicles in Airline Visual Identity...