ambient papers

When I say Prince do you wonder if I’m talking about Charles or Albert? Can you imagine the debate a record label might have with an artist today about the search engine optimization of royal family moniker?

Prince rebranded himself as a symbol to make a statement about how Warner Bros was treating him (his name, his identity). He pulled his whole catalog from Spotify two years ago because he didn’t feel like the payment structure respected the work of the artists. But now he’s dead and any idiot with a tiny computer in their hand can listen to him for free all the time.

Predicting trends is silly and hard, but making up trends and writing articles about them is easy. Lambasting said articles while speaking with unearned authority in a blog post is easy, too (and this counts as your warning). Take this recent article from the Wall Street Journal, “Book Covers See Yellow to Attract Online Shoppers.” [http://www.wsj.com/articles/cover-story-its-all-about-yellow-1464107830] The subhead really sums up its only point: “To stand out online, publishers push book designers for brighter, bolder covers. The hot color of the moment? Yellow.” Unfortunately, this point isn’t earned and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t hold any water, either.

The most irksome part of this article is the constant statement that “publishers push” for all of these yellow covers. They never talk to any publishers, though. They talk to two incredibly talented art directors, Peter Mendelsund and Robbin Schiff. Neither of them describe being chained to their Mac and forced to click yellow swatches by some probing publisher—they both reflect thoughtfully on how tiny thumbnails on the internet have changed the design process (or at least how we talk about the design process). They’re probably right, but when I looked at The New York Times hardcover fiction bestsellers lists for 1998 versus today, the only distinct difference I see are changing attitudes about type choice. Today’s list didn’t have more yellow covers than 1998’s. It’s also worth noting when I toggled from “Hardcover Fiction” to “Combined Print & E-book Fiction”, the later had significantly less yellow covers. Read into that what you will. Zing!  

The New York Times bestseller lists are not the be-all and end-all of publishing, but looking at the covers from two different decades highlighted some falsehoods in my base assumptions. For instance, the type on all the covers I looked at was generally the same size. I always assumed that book designers were able to make type as small as they wanted until the internet rolled around and ruined our tiny type fun. False. Have we always been designing covers to work as thumbnails? Newspapers and magazines have surely printed small pictures of books and I bet the sales people in publishing have always insisted the covers work at any size. I can’t answer this, I’m a child of the digital age and just haven’t been in the industry very long.

I got your letters cut paper collage + stickers 16.5″ x 11.7″

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Speaking of letters, my dad and I are fundraising right now for an @826nyc event called Scrabble for Cheaters. Our team is called The X Tiles and any money donated directly supports @826nyc​ and their important mission of literacy advocacy. Money donated also allows my dad and me to buy cheats that will help us advance through an elimination Scrabble tournament.

Last year, my team made it to the semifinal round. We used an epic invented word cheat for a bingo that was played across two triple word score tiles. Our invented word was immediately rebuffed by our opponents playing the reject a word cheat which cost us the match. Had they not rejected that word, we would have advanced to the final round (and lost—the winners last year were crazy good at scrabble and that invent a word was the last cheat in our arsenal). Please don’t let this happen again: please donate and support our team, The X Tiles, and 826NYC.

If you’re able to donate $50 or more to my team, I’ll mail you a glicee print of any collage/work that I’ve posted here. Email me with proof of donation at oh.corrigan [at] gmail.com with your address and which collage you’d like for the print.

from my spam folder to a screenshot to a bitmap