Terrific cover for a terrific book. A behind-the-scenes look at its creation is here. (via Snarkmarket)

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Penguin repackages the classics, including Wuthering Heights, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Cranford, Jane Eyre and Sense and Sensibility. Jane Smiley writes:

They are beautiful, they are tactile, covered in cloth with embossed designs. When I invite my friends over, they look at the covers, flip them over, feel the deckle-edged pages, open them to see the typeface. One friend, busy and involved with the newest of new media, at once imagines herself reclining on a brown leather couch and reading “Jane Eyre” (578 pp., $20) at her leisure — 26 ounces, black covers embossed with shiny red leaves, a red ribbon bookmark twinkling from the bottom edge.

(via Jacket Copy)

(via booklover, libraryland, and samsaramotel)

A History of 16 Science Fiction Classics, Told In Book Covers →

io9 shows the varied covers a handful of science fiction classics have borne over the years. (They cheat a little — showing only English editions for some books, while others include foreign editions, which for some reason are much more lurid.) As can be expected, some of the covers are incredibly bad, but mixed in with the pulpy stuff there are some moments of true beauty (and then this,too).

This cover to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, designed by David Pearson, is probably one of my favorite covers of all time. (Via The Second Pass)

Fact labels for credit cards →

NYT op-ed on a proposal to radically simplify and standardize credit card information disclosure in order to help customers better understand what they’re getting into. I love this idea, inspired in part by the FDA’s nutrition facts standards — it’s good design that helps empower people.

Stripe Generator - ajax diagonal stripes background designer →

A cool online tool for making Web page backgrounds. (See also this one.)

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web →

I’m in love with this site. Text-heavy Web design seems to be my thing — and I’ll definitely need to make use of this guide later.

Unicode Characters as Named and Numeric HTML Entities →

If you’ve ever wondered, “Hey, I need to know how to encode this Unicode character in HTML,” this is your site — a big honkin’ list of every Unicode entity encoding in both hex and decimal.

The hardest thing I’ve had to do for my internship so far is by far the most mundane — designing an order form. I’ve been writing press releases and editing jacket copy and catalog copy, and while it’s all hard work and pretty taxing, making a nice-looking order form that fits in a really small space took a lot out of me.

So here’s the finished result for better or worse. (At least until I’m given some revisions.) Hopefully this is a good form — and I don’t have to do another one for a long time.

Free Hi Resolution Wood Textures →

While working on a poster for an event, I needed a nice woodgrain texture for the background. Here’s a bunch of free ones.

"Design is first and foremost about pleasure, a point that is easy to lose sight of in the corporate environment."

Mandy Brown

The State of the Web - Summer 2008 →

A beautiful and brilliant on what’s happening on the Internet these days. And set in a nice font! (via livejamie)

Debris →

A manifesto of sorts about removing junk from blogs. Worth a read.