A Fabulous Video Animation of a Bookstore
This charming video came to my inbox this week. A bookstore, animated, in all its touchable, three dimensional quirky wonder. Check it out, and support your local bookstore!
Alphabet Road Trip | the blog of Iskra Design
Ahhh, the Return of the Hardcover Book!!
A recent spate of articles about the resurgence of interest in real hold-in-your hand books warms my heart. Whenever I think of December at its center is the image of The Beloved Book Store, warm, glowing, full of promise, and the hours I spend there browsing, dreaming in fiction, and studying book and cover design.
Here is an excerpt from yesterday’s New York Times article “E-Books, Shmee-Books: Readers Return to the Stores:”
Facing economic gloom and competition from cheap e-readers, brick-and-mortar booksellers entered this holiday season with the humblest of expectations.
But the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders, the chain that went out of business this year.
Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, said that comparable store sales this Thanksgiving weekend increased 10.9 percent from that period last year. The American Booksellers Association, a trade group for independents, said last week that members saw a sales jump of 16 percent in the week including Thanksgiving, compared with the same period a year ago.
At the R. J. Julia bookstore in Madison, Conn., sales of adult trade books in November rose 30 percent over last year, said Roxanne J. Coady, the owner.
I am sorry to see Borders leave the scene, but it looks to be a huge boon to the small independent book seller. Here is a recent Random House cover, for which I created custom typography. The subtle ones are often the hardest to do. Sometimes the job of typography is to be very quiet, almost invisible…..but just right.
New Calligraphic Icons, Work in Progress
©Iskra Design
Icon project for an art center: different approaches to representing dance, by way of the classic ballet slipper.
Handwriting in Advertising: New Project for Dulera
When the art director for this project sent me the photos of the model I knew exactly what her handwriting should look like. I love this kind of expressive work, where true handwriting shines. In this kind of work I am an actress, channeling the spirit and character of the subject.
Zen Brushwork in Lettering Design: Tools of the Trade
When the art director at Penguin USA called to ask me to write the word “Zen” for a book called Zen and the Art of Making a Living it couldn’t have come at a better time. I was at that very moment sitting on my meditation cushion in a corner of my office contemplating The Emptiness after finishing several advertising campaigns, and I had nothing on my calendar. Although I felt cold terror at the prospect of this little three letter word, a word that conjured centuries of calligraphy masters in their robes and sandals not to mention the three sensei I had studied with, I said “Sure.” And then I said to myself, as I gathered up a dozen brushes and pens and stacks of paper, “It can’t be any harder than that other three-letter word, “new.”
Stones and metal weight used to keep fragile rice paper from lifting
At that time I was still grinding my own ink, using a traditional inkstone. Now for most brushwork I use Moon Palace Ink which I get from John Neal Books, although I sometimes grind ink from a stick and mix it with liquid ink for certain very absorbent papers.
Inkstone and traditional sumi ink.
The ink must be tested out many times to see how black it is, blotted and tried on different papers, with different brushes, as each one gives a different effect. I also use pens, which give a different character entirely.
Automatic pen, oldstyle ruling pen, edged pen, new ruling pen, steel brush
As I work I am designing in the moment with the gesture of the brush. I try to remain intuitive and kinesthetic, feeling the drag of the ink and the paper and experimenting with the invisible element of calligraphy: time. How fast or slow you move the brush completely transforms the stroke. Design, however, includes inconvenient facts like the resemblance of a “Z” to a “2” and psychological factors: should the word feel elegant and disciplined? artful? playful? ordinary? I keep all this into account as well as the history of western calligraphic forms and the basic styles of shodo. The final style that was chosen for the title is based on a hybrid of “bone” and “clerical” styles of Chinese calligraphy. The book is now in its fifth printing, but has kept the same title throughout.
Photographs and calligraphy © 2011 Iskra Johnson
About Iskra
Designer, calligrapher, lettering artist. Read more 