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Pantone, best known among designers for their standardized color matching system, has announced the top ten colors for men’s and women’s fashion for Spring 2016! The list: PANTONE 13-1520 Rose Quartz PANTONE 16-1548 Peach Echo PANTONE 15-3919 Serenity PANTONE 19-4049 Snorkel Blue PANTONE 12-0752 Buttercup PANTONE 13-4810 Limpet Shell PANTONE 16-3905 Lilac Gray PANTONE 17-1564 Fiesta […]

Illumination/Universal's push to make its Minions a household name is reaching into some kooky corners.

by JooHee Yoon (Enchanted Lion, 2015)

(click to enlarge)

This book is something. A mashup of poetry and pictures, washes of color and words.

(click to enlarge; this is an example of a spread that folds out to reveal an entirely new and more expansive illustration.)

Some thoughts from JooHee on the art and creation of Beastly Verse:

I wanted to create a book that not only tells wonderful stories, but one that is beautiful to behold. For me, the design of the book is just as important as its content; they are inseparably linked. I believe all elements of a book–its paper, binding, size and weight–create an atmosphere that plays an important role in the experience of reading.

The printing process fascinates me. Not only traditional printmaking, but also industrial processes as well, since these are just a further development of the old printmaking techniques. I have always been drawn to printmaking, and rather than mixing colors on a palette and putting them on paper, I enjoy working with flat color layers overlapping one another to create the secondary colors. My experience with printmaking informs almost all of my artwork today. I wanted to take advantage of the industrial printing process so the printer is not just reproducing the image I make, but in a sense creating the image itself.

This book has been printed using just three colors. The areas where the main colors overlap create secondary colors, resulting in a book that seems very colorful even though only a limited palette was used. Seen alone, each layer is a meaningless collection of shapes, but when overlapped, these sets of shapes are magically transformed into the intended image. To me the process of creating these images is like doing a puzzle, figuring out what color goes where to make a readable image.

I am very inspired by books from the early 1900s – 1950, when artists were forced to work with spot colors since reproduction methods weren’t as developed as they are today. It is amazing what some artists could do with just two or three colors, and this is exactly the same process I am using, but one from choice rather than necessity. There is a luminous brilliant quality to the colors when images are reproduced this way that I love.

(click to enlarge; this is an example of a spread that folds out to reveal an entirely new and more expansive illustration.)

It’s fascinating to pull the curtains back on an illustrator’s process, and I’m thankful to JooHee for her words here. Her explanation of something so simple, so exquisite, and so complex is as brilliant as those colors she creates.

And the book itself is definitely a work of art. Uncoated, thick pages. Slightly oversized. There’s a non-uniform feeling to the ends that isn’t quite a deckled edge, but a bit more raw and tactile. Hand-crafted almost.

(click to enlarge)

Beastly Verse’s dedication reads simply, For the Reader.

Here, the reader is also the design enthusiast, the art collector, and the wordsmith. A book for book lovers.

Huge thanks to Claudia Bedrick at Enchanted Lion for the images in this post. 

nevver:

Pantone

I just spend the whole morning struggling with how best to color skin tones in a project, so this post caught me… well, too late, I already finished. But I’m saving it in my “desert island” bookmarks folder. Many more colors/skins at the link itself. 

I’ve become a bit of a board book connoisseur in my old age.  While my cohorts are reading speculative YA fiction and high end narrative nonfiction I’ve been getting up close and personal with books that have pages that can double as coasters.  Aside from realizing just how difficult the darn things are to write (darn hard, she said cleanly) I’ve noticed that board books just don’t get a lot of credit on the interwebs.  There are no board book blogs.  No board book Goodreads Groups.  No hashtags for #boardbooklove or #boardbookwarrior (there are hashtags for #bbforever but they have nothing to do with titles for tots).  With all this in mind, I think there’s room enough in the universe for a post about some of the board books we’ve seen this year so far and what they have in their favor.  Cause when you read something 500 times, you’re either going to go insane or you’ll internalize it to the point where it’s the most fascinating thing you’ve ever read.  In the latter (or is it former?) category:

Bizzy Bear: Off We Go by Benji Davies – So here’s the deal with Bizzy Bear.  On the outset, I wasn’t impressed.  I got some of these books sent to me by Candlewick and give them this sort of cursory glance.  They star a bear.  He’s British (a fact you’ll notice in a couple of the driving scenes).  The most striking thing seemed to be that you could move things or lift things with these strangely sturdy little circle cut outs in various pictures.  So I brought some home for the small fry and didn’t think much of it.  Fast forward three months and I’m part of the unofficial Yanks for Bizzy Bear Fan Club.  I can even pinpoint where the change of heart occurred.  It all comes down to Bizzy Bear: Off We Go.  The plot, such as it is, concerns our titular bear as he hops a cab to a train to a plane to a vacation where he rounds out the story with a lovely lass he must have picked up mere moments after arriving (well played, bear).  I read this book quite a few times, impressed with its ability to stand up to a baby’s beating.  There must be some superior form of cardboard at work on this puppy since Bizzy take a licking and keeps on ticking.  But it really wasn’t until we got to an image of a roundabout that my mind was blown.

The set-up shows a little roundabout with traffic moving.  There are trees on the left and right sides of the roundabout and the traffic sort of disappears under them.  Turn a little wheel on the right and the traffic circles around the roundabout.  Simple, no?  I’m ashamed to say that it probably took me thirty-some readings of this book before I realized something strange. Normally when a baby book contains wheels that turn n’ such the characters appear rightside up and then upside down.  It’s a circle, after all.  Not so with Bizzy Bear.  By some miracle of modern construction there must be two separate wheels at work that make it so that the characters never appear upside down.  It has been all I could do to keep from tearing my child’s beloved book into shreds in order to figure out what the internal logistics where of something that many parents won’t even notice.  All the books in the series work (and, thanks to their poundability, are perfect for library collections) but this is the one that truly has my heart.  Head over to There’s a Book and you can see a video of some kids putting Bizzy Bear through his paces.

14 Comments on Board Books 2012: What Works. What Doesn’t., last added: 4/23/2012