Shot, directed & edited by Glen Milner for the Daily Telegraph, this short film was shot at Smith-Settle Printers in Leeds. The book being printed is Suzanne St Albans’ ‘Mango and Mimosa’ published as part of the Slightly Foxed series.

via The Casual Optimist

So, what did you get up to with your extra day?

February 29th only comes around once every four years, so the good folks at Spread the Word decided they’d mark the leap day by getting writers from across the globe to collaborate on writing a book. In a single day. And then publishing it as an e-book today, as part of the World Book Day celebrations. And they asked us to design the book for them.

In preparation, they put together four teams of writers: in Kuala Lumpur, Delhi, London and Vancouver; and created a loose structure with four main characters, one in each city. The writing process kicked off in Kuala Lumpur, overlapping with Delhi, and then London and Vancouver joined in as the sun came up over their skies.

In London the main character was called Dave Martin. To help provide some inspiration for the writers, Alistair spent the day playing the fictional character, wandering around London taking pictures and uploading them on Twitter for the writers to respond to, using the hash tag #24hourbook. You can check out the feed at @Mr_Dave_Martin, or check out this slideshow of the images. Here are just a few:

Meanwhile, the writers created a story that pulled the characters and cities together. They shared their progress on a Facebook page, writing the book itself on Google Docs.

The writing was edited late into the night, and we kicked off the design very early this morning. We worked in InDesign, and created both an .epub and a .pdf version of the finished book, which was published on the Spread the Word website around 5pm this afternoon. (We’re fairly sure we’ll be tweaking and refining the design in the next few days.)

If you’d like to check it out, you can download the ebook in the ePub format (which should work on Apple’s iBooks on the iPad and iPhone; and on most e-readers – though not Kindles. It’ll work on Adobe’s Digital Editions, but won’t look so nice) or as a PDF.

(Oh, and the lovely cover image is by the equally lovely Lee Roberts).

People have been foretelling the death of the book for years now.

Obviously, that’s not going to happen entirely, but more and more of our reading is already taking place on e-readers (Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Sony’s Reader, and WH Smith’s Kobo amongst others).

The Kindle is the current king, currently available in the UK just in its monotone e-ink format, but in the US also in its full-colour multimedia Fire version, which is much closer to Apple’s ubiquitous iPad.

These days books are released in a whole stack of different formats. Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro, originally available as a signed and numbered limited edition hardback, is now available as a paperback, as an e-book for all the major formats, and as a multimedia app for the iPhone and iPad, and also as an audio book.

For book designers, whether they work on covers, texts, or on integrated books (words and pictures), the industry is obviously undergoing a metamorphosis. A metamorphosis that brings possibilities as well as peril.

Looking just at book covers, which are designed to lure in readers, they’re no longer primarily experienced physically, but instead as tiny thumbnails on a computer screen or handheld device. Instead of a wealth of sizes, of formats, of textures and of finishes, we just have pixels.

This isn’t a massively new situation – people have been buying books from Amazon for a good few years now. But where previously you would still end up with a physical book in your hands, that’s no longer necessarily the case.

To add insult to injury, in the current incarnation of iBooks on the iPad and iPhone you hardly even get to see covers at full size – they blink past momentarily when you start a book, but that’s about it. You do at least get a full size cover on the Kindle (well, full screen-size that is, which is always the same size no matter what book you’re reading), but on the e-ink version it’s always black and white.

At the same time though, there’s a resurgence in the love of the book as an object, with all the main publishers pumping out high-end versions of their backlists, such as Penguin’s Clothbound Classics. Surely a designer’s playground.

So, what is the next chapter for books?

For what it’s worth, our best guess is that paperbacks will start to disappear, as more and more people buy e-readers (how long is it before a major author releases a best-seller just as an e-book?). Hopefully though the various bits of e-book software will develop so that covers will still be considered a fundamental part of a book. We can also see lavish editions of hardbacks becoming more common; and integrated books perhaps becoming more and more interactive, following the lead of magazines.

But heck, what do we know?

Fortunately, if you’re out in New York, you can go and listen to some folk who might know just a little bit more.

The Next Chapter – The Design and Publishing of the Digital Book is a talk taking place at Parsons on Thursday 26 January. It’s organised by the AIGA NY, and is moderated by Chip Kidd. Should be a good one.

Hopefully they’ll be recording it for those of us who can’t make it…

There’s been a heck of a lot of press this month about book cover design, which is a Very Good Thing. It’s often woefully overlooked in the design industry, let alone in the world at large.

Most of the press comes as a direct result of Julian Barnes namechecking the designer Suzanne Dean (creative director at Random House) in his acceptance speech for the Man Booker Prize, for his book The Sense of an Ending.

Check out this thoughtful piece from Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian, which looks at the growth of the book as object, in the face of the unstoppable march of the e-reader. And then take a look at this piece in the Telegraph about the design process behind the Dean cover; as well as this piece from Nick Duerden in the Independent naming a few of his favourite cover designers. All good stuff.

If you want to go a bit deeper, then make sure you check out Dan Wagstaff’s excellent blog The Casual Optimist, where he’s just published his favourite covers from 2010 and 2011. In the 2011 list, he features Peter Mendelsund’s fantastic series of Kafka covers (top, and below).

Mendelsund, art director at Knopf and Pantheon, is a bit of a god-like genius – we featured his gorgeous Last Werewolf cover back in April. You should definitely take a look at his brilliantly erudite blog, Jacket Mechanical. And if that whets your appetite, then sate it with Debbie Millman’s brilliant Design Matters interview with him. His path to becoming a designer is quite unique, and his thoughts about how a book cover should work are well worth listening to.

Interestingly, he mentions that he’s worried that he might be out of a job within five years, because of the growth of e-readers, and the consequent diminishing of the importance of cover design. Well heck, if he’s gonna be out of a job, there’s not much hope for the rest of us… He also mentions that he himself hasn’t read a physical book in years, as he now reads everything on an iPad; so frankly Mendelsund, you’ve only got yourself to blame.

If that isn’t enough, then check out: designer John Gall’s lovely blog, Spine Out; the Caustic Cover Critic blog, which seems to scoop everyone else on featuring the very latest book cover designs; the Book Cover Archive, which does what it says on the tin, and also has a good set of links to more blogs; and Faceout Books, which features in-depth analysis of individual covers – such as this post about our studio buddy David Pearson’s covers for Penguin’s Great Journeys series.

And if you’re still not done after all that lot, then how about you read an actual book? We can recommend Joe Dunthorne’s lovely Wild Abandon.