An Evening with Bookbuilders of Boston: "Judge a Book by its Cover"

modernsurvivalonline.com

The Bookbuilders event on February 29, “Judge A Book by Its Cover,” was highly informative and entertaining! Three very creative speakers illustrated the process of designing book covers. Alex Camlin, the Creative Director at Da Capo Press, Carol Chu, Associate Art Director at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Books, and George Restrepo, a locally based graphic designer, all brought students in Pub Club and others into their creative process.

The event started off with Alex Camlin, who has worked at Da Capo for eleven years. He began by emphasizing his personal style, which leaned more toward graphic art and away from photography. In going through the different phases of cover design for Jack Kerouac’s The Sea is My Brother, Camlin stressed looking at the styles of several of Kerouac’s other titles, such as On The Road.

Wanted: Nonhuman Critters for Human Children

bgiormova.blogspot.com

Lately I’ve been getting a bunch of queries featuring main characters that are beings previously unheard of. While I’m a big fan of aliens and/or other nonhuman critters playing a part in a story, sometimes when an author embarks on a tale including only a checkerboard, slimy, spherical, who-knows-what, the plotline gets really difficult to understand. Stories featuring animals (families of bunnies, dogs, cats, etc.) all work because those animals are something a child is familiar with already. However, a host of some things previously unknown, like tiny, fluffy cubes, are going to have a hard time keeping kids interested enough to turn the page, unless the next page consists of the cubes interacting with a relatable human character. Fluffballs can work, but they can’t stand on their own; there must be some relatable animals or humans in there too.