UPDATE: Designer Edie Freedman talks about the cover designs here.
Monday, 17 September 2012
Beasties
One of the bookshops I haunt has a specialist area where they sell textbooks and the like: whenever I visit that section, I sually see an array of programming textbooks from O'Reilly Media. Given that these books are usually about the complex minutiae of various computer languages, database implementation and other coding problems, it must be hard to come up with dynamic cover images that represent the topic. So I have to admit to admiring the way they just said, "That's impossible, so fuck it, let's put animals on them all!" (this is not sarcasm, by the way--these books really do stand out from the other books on the same theme, which usually have abstract CGI blobs or stock photos of young people looking amazed at monitors).
UPDATE: Designer Edie Freedman talks about the cover designs here.
UPDATE: Designer Edie Freedman talks about the cover designs here.
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9 comments:
I like the idea of Git the configuration librarian and his nocturnal adventures. You've got to start kids early on this stuff.
That would be such a sweet story.
I would totally read this.
The story behind the animal covers is pretty interesting.
That article is so neat! I've often seen those books and wished I actually understood programming.
Those do sound like animal names in some alien language though. Great solution.
Matt, thank you for the link: I'll add it to the post.
If you work among web/IT specialists you may pick up their (our) habit of referring in conversation to "the polar bear book", "the gecko book" etc. O'Reilly is cool :-)
That's not a bad way of doing it!
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