Goosebumps is Hideous (and it's not intentional)

If you were a kid in the mid '90s, you grew up on Goosebumps. R.L. Stine churned them out at a clip of about one per month from 1992-97, and everyone I knew had a shelfful.

And while some book fads from the '90s have faded away (au revoir, Animorphs!), Goosebumps can still be found at Borders, albeit with a different cover design. And therein lies the problem.


Book cover design is an art form, and generally speaking, it's getting better and better. And while it may be that publishers often pay less attention to individual covers for a kids' series (knowing that once kids get hooked, they can pretty much phone the rest of the series in), Goosebumps covers of the 90s were always cool. A simple two-color design with nubby, embossed lettering and a creepy illustration (done by Tim Jacobus). They were simple, but they had a consistent quality to them.


The covers of today are not only cheaper (no embossed lettering), the design is also far worse. Incredibly, it's the same artwork, but the rest of the layout is a hodgepodge of horrible design choices. They've tried to make the slime look more realistic with a Photoshop emboss/drop shadow combination, but it ends up looking extremely amateur and fake. And the type treatment has gotten worse across the board--the thicker type of the author's name is too bold, skewing and drop shadowing "Goosebumps" looks awful, and the tagline now gets lost and looks ugly.

How is it possible that this could happen to such a hugely successful series? I am truly aghast. Somebody, do something. Please. Keep reading...

Atlanta's Newspaper Gets Freshified

On Tuesday, April 28, my hometown newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, unveiled its drastic redesign. The change began several months ago with a new, more modern logo, and culminated in a total overhaul of the look of the paper itself.

The new AJC is now narrower, with a more vertical layout and cleaner typography. It is gratifying and encouraging to see a local newspaper make such an investment in its future, considering the constant heralding of the end of the printed news industry.

As a bit of a news junkie and newspaper snob, I always considered the AJC nearly superfluous and irrelevant. I got my news online throughout the day, and read the New York Times on Sundays for more in-depth and unusual stories. Yet this redesign has me rethinking my anti-AJC bias.

Where the old paper was flat and staid, the new one feels dynamic and fun. And to me, an unabashed Europhile, the new font (Publico) feels fresh and hip. The hierarchy is denser yet simplified, allowing the reader’s eye to skip easily around the page. Colors are brighter, and are used deftly to create areas of focus and interest.

A recession redesign is a brave bet, but one I believe will pay off. The new AJC stands out among its peers, and looks more like a paper from a trendsetting international city, rather than just another so-so local paper.

Interestingly, the new design is extremely polarizing. I showed it to several design-minded people where I work, and two of them thought the new paper actually looked old/worse. Of course, good creative work always elicits strong reactions, both good and bad.

I applaud the AJC and its design team on this impressive accomplishment. If you’re interested in reading more, Charles Apple, a journalist/designer, wrote an extensive blog entry a couple months ago detailing the process that led to the new look. It’s quite informative, and interesting to see the other options that were considered. Keep reading...

Fascinating

In book design, as with many things in life, simplicity is better. With hundreds of thousands of books released each year, publishers must make their titles stand out and communicate to prospective buyers instantly. Sometimes this is as simple as featuring the author’s name big and bold (John Grisham, Sue Grafton, etc.), and sometimes it is with a straightforward photo or illustration.

And many times it is the title. Titles can be mysterious or informative, plain or controversial, but one rule is common across genres and designs: rarely the title more than four or five words. Many times, in fact, it is far less: one word. A title should be memorable, easy to recommend or request as a gift. A title strives to be as short as possible, without becoming generic. If it sounds generic (House, Baseball, etc.) the design must step up to make it stand out.

There is a part of the bookstore that trades in these catchy one-word titles more than any other: the history section. Here a browser can find all sorts of intriguing titles—for example Coal, Wood, Drink, Salt, and Cod. Each of these books takes a single subject and explores its place in history. The appeal lies in the magnification of a seemingly mundane object and its concomitant contextualization in the grand story of human history. This naming technique could theoretically be almost infinitely adapted : War, Computer, Book, etc., simply by distilling an otherwise obscure or complicated matter into a neatly defined title. This makes the book appear to be the definitive source on the subject at hand, a must-read for anyone with an interest in that topic.

As a bibliophile myself, I am consistently drawn in by books like Cod and Wood. I may not have cared a whit about Cod before, but seeing an entire book written about its significance suddenly makes me very curious. Reading books like these enables one to experience history from a new perspective. Rather than reading a linear account of 18th century European commerce, one sees the role that the cod trade played in this story. It’s a fascinating and enjoyable way to digest potentially dry facts and events, and a niche genre of non-fiction I highly recommend.

Keep reading...

Sunday Links

The New York Times has put together an interactive infographic showing the history of Olympic torch design, apparently reading my mind (two months ago I had searched for a book on just such a topic).


Wordle creates customizable word clouds of whatever text or website you choose. Keep reading...

Another Awesome NY Times Chart

An amazing map of human diseases, sorted by genes that certain diseases share. Keep reading...

Democratization of Personalization

Virginia Hefferman takes a look how the ability to customize nearly everything in our (digital) lives has become a major time sink, and a detriment to productivity, in her weekly The Medium column in the New York Times Magazine.

Article Keep reading...