Free blank thumbnails for book design.

When I design the cover for a book I like to read the book first, this is not always pos­si­ble, but it is impor­tant to talk at length with the author and get the feel­ing and mean­ing of the book. The next step is research­ing the book to find related infor­ma­tion about the topic or genre. Tak­ing that infor­ma­tion into account, I find it impor­tant to brain­storm. I like to get away from the com­puter and sketch out ideas on paper. One great exer­cise is to take a page full of blank thumb­nails and quickly sketch out dif­fer­ent ideas. It’s a fun way to find con­nec­tions and mean­ings and develop a rela­tion­ship between the book and the cover.

To make it eas­ier for myself, I’ve cre­ated few pages of blank thumb­nails that I use when I work on book jack­ets, and I’d like to share them with you. Included on the PDF are thumb­nails for hard cover, paper­backs and for fun I threw in a tri-fold brochure. Down­load them, print them and brain­storm away! Please use them and pass them along if you found them useful.

Click here to download

Don’t for get to check out my port­fo­lio and see some book jack­ets I’ve designed.

A few laughs for fellow Typophiles

As we know, typog­ra­phy is key in many designs. From the great type treat­ments used in Chipp Kidd’s book cov­ers, to the inscrip­tions on the base of  Trajan’s Col­umn and even to the inven­tive destruc­tion of type by David Car­son; type is inte­gral to com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Mod­ern dig­i­tal type rests on the shoul­ders of giants, cuneiform scribes tal­ly­ing cat­tle on the muddy plains of Mesopotamia, Phoeni­cian traders with pur­ple dye and scrolls in hand, Gut­ten­berg at his press and mod­ern typog­ra­phers Max Miedinger, Eduard Hoff­mann or House Indus­tries. But this doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with type! I know these have been around for a while, but they are always clas­sics, and what doesn’t say clas­sic like good typog­ra­phy? That and fonts insult­ing each other.

Font Con­fer­ence, so this is what hap­pens in font man­age­ment soft­ware when were not looking!

Font Fight! Sock ‘em Helvetica!

Also here’s an extremely quick list of some good type related links, I hope you’ll find they are your type too:

Resources & Forums:

• Typophile.com: love the font, meet fel­low tyopol­philes and bitch about Comic Sans.
• MyFonts.com: Look at all the fonts, won­der­ful stuff, but be pre­pared to max out the credit card or be lost for hours look­ing at all the great stuff.

Great Type Foundries:

• House Indus­tries: All I want for Christ­mas is the Shag font!
• FontDiner.com: Awe­some retro fonts, I highly rec­om­mend them. Keep an eye out for the type face font­diner & font­diner loungy, you’ll see them everywhere.
• Linotype.com: Just the clas­sics please.