Design It: Penguin Classics

I don't know about you, but when I see an orange Penguin Classic book I can not help but get excited. Their design is so simple yet beautiful! I am a strong believer in simplicity. A good design does not need ten million things going on at once to grab your attention. In fact, busy designs tend to hurt my brain because it does not know where to focus it's attention. When I am designing I like to use the common fashion rule: "Look in the mirror and take off one accessory before leaving the house." Except I change it to "Take one excessive part of the design out before sending it to the printer." Clean, simple designs have so much more of an impact on the viewer and are usually the most memorable. For instance, I bet you could see the binding of a Penguin Classic cover from across the room and know exactly who the publisher is. That orange and cream cover will forever represent Penguin books in your mind. I actually have been seeing less and less of these beautiful covers around lately. I believe they are pretty rare in the US, but thankfully they are available in other countries. Well, lucky for those of you in England and Australia (I am so jealous!). Below are some of the great products Penguin sells with their iconic orange and cream cover. I am in LOVE with the Jane Eyre mug!!

1. Box of Postcards
2. Sherlock Holmes Book
3. Cover Art Book
4. Cover Bag
5. Jane Eyre Mug

DIY: Old Book Inspiration Board

So sorry for the lack of posts I am still try to get into the swing of things since starting this semester. I do want to share some of my projects I worked on last semester now that they have all been graded and I have them back. I am always interested in what other teachers assign so I thought it would be fun to share what I was given to work on. Until I get them photographed, here is a fun DIY I worked on today. It is super simple and takes very little time or money. First let me say, I LOVE inspiration boards. They help me organize my thoughts and even my room. A lot of times the small little pieces of paper and photos I accumulate get scattered all over making it a mess. Not only do I miss out on displaying the cute things I have collected but I sometimes even loose them in the shuffle. My solution to this problem is to create a large inspiration board to tack all of these items on. In the past I have used plain old cork boards until I stumbled upon the idea of covering them with old book pages.

All you really need are a few things...

• A large cork board (which can be purchased at your local craft or office supply store, lucky for me my sister was getting rid of hers)

• An old book you don't mind tearing apart (mine was a $2 thrift store purchase I had from a previous project)

• Some double sided tape (you can really use whatever adhesive you prefer this just works best for me)

The assembly is pretty self explanatory. I ripped my pages out and left them pretty jagged (I think it adds to the vintage look). I then put a piece of double sided tape on the back of each page, in each corner. There was really no strategy for placing the pages on the board. Some where longways, sideways, and even upside down. The outer pages I slid underneath the wooden frame in order to secure them even more, and make it look less sloppy. I also tried not to clump pages together that were all going the same direction. It is better when it looks unintentional, and not so uniform. Over all it came out pretty good. This particular board will be going in my office/studio, and once it is filled up with tons of inspiration I will show you what it looks like!

Here is a picture of my first book page board I did a couple of years ago. It hangs in my room and holds a ton of memories that I love to be reminded of everyday I walk past it...