Yellow Car Design: The Blog » book

Hey, are you a book or a DVD?

ycd — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:26:07 +0000

Eat Pray Love

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Fight Club

The Beach

Trainspotting

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Recently I was in a bookstore where they had a display of the latest edition of the novel Eat Pray Love. The cover featured Julia Roberts sitting on a bench next to a nun, eating something with a sheepish look on her face and it really annoyed me. I wasn’t annoyed because of her – I don’t mind her, and same thing goes for Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ewan McGregor & company– but because of the whole “oh-now-that-we-made-a-movie-with-that-book-let’s-pretend-that-they’re-the-same-thing” thing. We all know this is rubbish, and that in most case movies based on books end up being very different (sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way).

So why did the publishing company felt like they had to put Julia Roberts on the cover of the book? Don’t we see her enough on the movie posters? See, if I want to own something with her face on it, I’ll buy the DVD. Because she is an actress, not a novel character. I might have been interested in reading the book –though the story sounds a bit too soppy– with its original typography-based cover because it had a concept behind it (“eat” written in pasta, “pray” in beads, etc) and wasn’t like “hey reader, we think you don’t have enough imagination to picture the main character in your head, so here’s a picture of the actress who plays the role in the film so that you have something to relay on”… How annoying!

Marc and I both recently read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo* (with the nice colorful jacket) and we also rented the movie to compare scenarios. Even though I enjoyed both I am very happy to have read the book without knowing what the main character looked like in the film and actually, in my head, she was pretty similar to the actress who portrayed her in the film. So now I can say “wow, well done my imagination, you worked well without being dictated how to picture the character by a book cover”. Do you know what I mean?

Anyways, it made me think about the whole “issue” and I’ve checked our bookcase and realized that a lot of the novels we own have been made into films. And that, strangely enough, only one of them, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has the cover featuring Johnny Depp that was made after the film… And we almost certainly bought this version of the book because the original one wasn’t available at the bookstore! In the examples above, I think that the original non-movie tie-in version are all better… What do you think? Any example where the movie-inspired cover beats the original one?
Vick @ Yellow Car Design

*We strongly recommend it and can’t wait to read the sequel. The author was a graphic designer and there are lots of graphic design references… That was an added bonus for us

Book – Things I have learned in my life so far, by Stefan Sagmeister

ycd — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:17:49 +0000

: Stefan Sagmeister – Things I have learned in my life so far

We are quite addicted to design books. Unfortunately, most of the ones we own are still in England in a box weighing over 60 kg. We really miss them and due to the very high cost of shipping we can’t afford to have them ‘cargoed’ over for the moment so we are in the process of slowly rebuilding our book collection. The first book that we got in Canada is Things I have learned in my life so far, by Stefan Sagmeister. The title is pretty self-explanatory; Sagmeister listed the things he’s learned in his diary and then started to visually illustrate the maxims on billboards, magazines, covers, etc. The book is a recollection of that. We do like the fact that the book is made of 15 little booklets, each one with a different cover so that when we alternate them in the laser-cut box it gives the book a different look. It means that if we weren’t afraid that our big cats would chew on it we could display it on a shelf and alternate the covers everyday for a two-week period. Just joking, we’re not that sad. Anyways, that’s certainly a book that we recommend, both as something to read and as something to have.

It has a website, too, where people can send Sagmeister Inc. an interpretation of the things that they have learned in their own lives, just click here to open the link.

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Nous sommes accros aux livres sur le design. Malheureusement, la plupart des nôtres sont entreposés dans une boîte pesant plus de 60 kg en Angleterre. Ils nous manquent énormément et à cause du coût exorbitant de l’expédition par cargo nous sommes incapables de nous les faire livrer pour le moment. Nous sommes donc en train de rebâtir notre collection, petit-à-petit. Le premier livre que nous avons acheté au Canada est Things I have learned in my life so far, par Stefan Sagmeister. Le titre est auto-explicatif: l’auteur a fait la liste des choses qu’il a apprises et s’est par la suite appliqué à illustrer chaque maxime sur des panneaux publicitaires, magazines, couvertures de rapports, etc. Le livre documente ses explorations. On aime le fait que le livre soit composé de 15 petits livrets, chacun avec sa propre couverture donc lorsqu’on alterne l’ordre des livrets dans la boîte coupée au laser on obtient différentes couvertures de livre. Cela veut donc dire que si l’on avait pas peur que nos gros chats le grugent on pourrait le disposer sur l’étagère et alterner la couverture à chaque jour pour une période de deux semaines. C’est une blague; nous ne sommes quand même pas si pathétiques que ça!

Le livre a un site internet où les gens peuvent envoyer leurs propres interprétations des choses qu’ils ont apprises dans leur vie à Sagmeister Inc. Cliquer ici pour ouvrir la page.