Girl Scouts of the United States of America booklet, 1954 Monsieur Teste, 1947 Silver and Judaica Collection, 1963 God and the Ways of Knowing, 1957

Since we’ve already got books on the brain: Imprint has reviewed ”The Lustig’s: A Cover Story,” currently showing at the College of Visual Arts Gallery in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Marking the first time both Lustigs’ work can be viewed side by side, the collection includes over 500 covers designed and illustrated by the modernist heavyweights, graphic designers Alvin and Elaine Lustig. 

It’s well worth taking a peek at the Alvin and Elaine Lustig Design group over on Flickr for a larger sample of the Lustigs’ astonishingly enormous body of work, well-worn covers and all.

- Maggie

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Otherwise Pandemonium by Nick Hornby Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Designers Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan throw around some theories on what attracts readers to a book cover. Some silly, some serious - it’s mostly just light psychological hypothesizing and it’s all in good fun, but if you were to really investigate, there’s a whole slew of psychology studies on aesthetics out there that can back up any good design principle. It’s endlessly fascinating to me that a naturally talented designer will simply intuit the visual landscape that brain studies can only play catch-up to after the fact, confirming that, yes, this or that specific design type is inherently cognitively pleasing.

Also, I guess I’m just in a mid-Monday brain fog, but I completely missed the entire underwear angle of this great Lolita cover re-design when I first saw it. Whew! All for the best, I suppose.

- Maggie

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This month sees the release of Alex Steinweiss: The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover, Taschen’s LP-sized retrospective of work from the originator of album cover art. 

Alex Steinweiss invented the album cover as we know it, and created a new graphic art form. In 1940, as Columbia Records’ young new art director, he pitched an idea: Why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months its record sales increased by over 800 percent.

A favorite is Gershwin’s “Concerto in F,” on which graphic designer Steve Heller comments:

“This is one of Steinweiss’s most symbolically eloquent and graphically exquisite works. The thin, condensed typography echoes the light coming through the building windows. The color of the city is not in the skyscrapers but on the street, where the tenements meet the El.”

- Maggie

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