On 3 March 2016, schools across the world will be celebrating World Book Day.
A good designer can make the difference between a book going completely unnoticed or finding its way to the top of the best seller list. What is it about the cover of a book that makes you want to pick it off a shelf and read it?
Chip Kidd is a graphic designer in New York, famously known for creating the original Jurassic Park book cover. If you are looking for a good summary of the challenges around book cover design, he made a brilliant TED talk in 2012 that I recommend taking a look at. (Be careful though - if you are going to show this in class, at 7min and 9min there is some unsavoury language and pictures!)
The Penguin Random House Design Award is a competition for university and HND level design students to take part in a live brief. Students are asked to create new designs for existing well-loved stories. Although school age students cannot enter, you may wish to try this with your classes. Here are some of last year’s entries for the children’s categories, featuring Alice in Wonderland and James and the Giant Peach. Why not find out which books the English department are studying and do some existing product research?
If you are looking for some more book-related design ideas to try in your design and technology lessons, here is a community resource that might make a good starting point.
If the manufacturing of books is something that your students are interested in, you could take a look at these videos that show how a hardback book is produced and larger scale manufacture of books in the US.
If you are planning to look at analysing other types of print, this resource looks at analysing the content of newspapers and the pictures, colours and font used in packaging.