Huge Reads

Recent sales figures in the US have confirmed that readers are returning to the printed word as ebook sales start to decline, so our annual book cover design project feels surprisingly relevant this year. This time around the project was 'Huge Reads' - a proposed Penguin initiative to persuade readers to tackle bigger books that might be challenging, time-consuming, difficult or perhaps just literally too heavy to carry around. The students had to select three titles from a series of seven classic novels of more than 700 pages, and design the covers purely in typography.

A good example that blends the literary themes with minimalism and a sense of 'huge' expanse and drama came from Hannah Bleck, who chose George Eliot's Middlemarch, Melville's Moby Dick, and Tolstoy's epic Anna Karenina.

The jacket blurbs on the back are left-ranged and spaced right across the page, whilst the front covers each feature subtle tweaks to typography with a classic-looking serif typeface and brooding colour scheme.  A bigger selection of work from this project will be going on our pinterest boards soon.

Coffee In A Book

Some inventive print design from Matt White on the latest NC project - a packaging brief for Glasgow-based coffee specialists Matthew Algie who were looking to create one-off gift packs of their best-selling flavours, exclusively on sale only in the National Gallery of Scotland.

Matt came up with the idea of packaging three flavours of coffee in book cover jackets rather than standard pinch bags or foil packs.  He connected each flavour to an artist whose work is on display at the Gallery - Tinderbox is connected to Emil Nolde, Pandora to John Bellany, and Forza to pioneering Modernist John Cecil Stephenson.

Inspired by Grammar school textbooks and Modernism, Matt then combined vector illustration, bold colour and clean sans serif typography to create a set of balanced, minimal paperback book covers. Each can be displayed separately at the point-of-sale, or also packaged as a trilogy or box set.

Dystopian Design Buddies

As if we aren't busy enough getting our HND class ready for the first Mentoring Evening of the session (Wed 24th), we're about to launch a new employer engagement strategy for the HNC group.

This new idea is the 'Design Buddies' programme, where students get to buddy-up with some of our recent graduates, who will then form a mentor-student relationship, popping into college to do crits and providing feedback and art direction on various projects. The idea is to get our HNC class acclimatised to working with industry people so that when they move into the final year and join the mentoring programme, the transition is less daunting and smoother. Initially we've asked ten of our former grads, all working in agencies across Edinburgh and Glasgow, to sign up to be a Design Buddy. First up for them to get their teeth into will be a book cover design project.

This project is set every year at HNC, and covers a lot of the techniques, ideas and process required for the Typography and Design in Context units at SCQF level 7.  Last year the project brief was to design covers for four classic Raymond Chandler novels.  This time around, we've decided to go with the theme of 'Dystopia'.  The brief asks the students to design three covers from list of eight titles suggested by the client, Penguin.  The solution needs to be purely typographic, and the titles must be part of a collectable series. The list includes works by the likes of George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, Marge Piercy and William Gibson.

The Design Buddies can expect a sizeable PDF in their inbox soon containing sketchbook ideas and early versions of design work for Dystopia.