Book 3, Reimagined Art: VOX by Nicholson Baker

HOLY CRAP! It's been 6 months and Matt finally has something to put up!

Anywho...

So, to refresh your memory this book is one long phone conversation leading to phone sex. For this cover I wanted the foundation to be a fairly sexy head shot of a woman talking on the phone. However, I wasn't able to drum up a willing female volunteer for a photograph... 

Okay that sounded a little dirty. But I digress.

I ended going in the ironic direction. I found a perfect vintage, black and white photo of a 50's housewife on the web. 

I used the magic of Matt-i-color (the cheap Rhode Island version of Technicolor) and brightened up the picture a bit.

I then imported the whole sha-bang into Illustrator and, using Adobe trickery and a darker picture, brought the title magically out of the photo. Voila! The finished cover:

The floor is now open for comments, questions, suggestions, and critiques.

And keep an eye out on the site soon. I'll be posting various projects I've done in class... the 21st century version of a spelling test on the fridge!

Amazing Album Covers: Okkervil River & William Schaff

I'd been hearing a lot about this band called Okkervil River. So I picked up their new CD, The Stand Ins, and I have to say I like them quite a bit. They have this very melodic and eclectic sound reminiscent of a lot of bands I've been listening to lately. Go to their site to check out their tunes.

One thing I didn't catch right away, though, was a very special detail about their album covers.

They're not done on a computer. They're not drawn or painted. That's right all my crafty friends out there... THEY'RE EMBROIDERED! How fucking cool it that?!

To top it all off (and to demonstrate how small Rhode Island is), the artist, William Schaff, is a local Providence musician who plays with the What Cheer? Brigade. 

What a small world...

International Covers and Process: The Gone-Away World

I'm currently reading THE GONE-AWAY WORLD by Nick Harkaway which, might I say, is one hell of a page turner. Here's the description:

There couldn’t be a fire along the Jorgmund Pipe. It was the last thing the world needed. But there it was, burning bright on national television. The Pipe was what kept the Livable Zone safe from the bandits, monsters, and nightmares the Go-Away War had left in its wake. The fire was a very big problem. Enter Gonzo Lubitsch and his friends, the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company, a team of master troubleshooters who roll into action when things get particularly hot. They helped build the Pipe. Now they have to preserve it—and save humanity yet again. Equal parts raucous adventure, comic odyssey, geek nirvana, and ultra-cool epic, The Gone-Away World is a story of—among other things—love, pirates, mimes, greed, and ninjas. But it is also the story of a world, not unlike our own, in desperate need of heroes—however unlikely they may seem.

I'm reading the standard version which has this dust jacket:

Pops out at you right?! What's really cool and is not reflected in the photo is that all of the pink areas are actually felted with velvet material. So on top of being bright it's fuzzy too!

However, their is another cover floating around that I believe is the UK version, seen here:

The book has it's own website (which in it's own right is pretty fantastic) and they offer up a link to show the process of designing the UK cover! Well worth the visit.

Anyway, I highly suggest picking this up. It's been one of the better books I've read in a long, long time.

NOTE: Info on the designers from the author himself!

"The Knopf jacket is by Jason Booher. The Heinemann one is by Glenn O'Neill. There's also a painfully sexy limited boxed edition in black and red. I'm fairly sure that one's Glenn, too."

For more background info from Nick Harkaway's mouth to your eyes, check out the comments for this post.

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Book 3, Background Info: VOX by Nicholson Baker

VOX is a novella which, in fact, is one long conversation. There are no chapter breaks. There are no separate sections. Just one long phone conversation. And what is this conversation about, you may ask? Ladies and gentlemen... everything you ever wanted to know about phone sex.

Amazing Covers: George Orwell & Shepard Fairey

Check out these very fucking cool new covers of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm as designed by Shepard Fairey: