Cavalcade of Awesome

Last week I did a Weekly Geeks theme in which I discussed several alternate, foreign book covers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  It was cool doing the research for that and while looking around I came across several other alternate book covers that were so cool I had to share them here.

The covers we’ll look at today are different than the Harry Potter covers, though.  The book covers I am going to show you today are entirely fan created by graphics artists.  They create them because they are a fan of design and there are several initiatives on their blogs and in Flickr where they create these designs just to stay sharp and keep up on their designing skills.  These book covers may not be real, but they rock.  They look entirely professional, like some publisher actually created these and are selling them somewhere.  Don’t go thinking they are available in some crazy limited edition in Uruguay, and I had to traipse my lazy, white ass through the Uruguayan jungles to find these little treasures.  I didn’t, I barely want to traipse my ass to the fridge for another Girl Scout Cookie.  I’m not going to Uruguay for a book.  However, if these books were real, I would be very tempted to try.

So let’s start off with cover redesigns from the series I talked about last week; Harry Potter (click the images for larger versions).

Graphic artist M.S. Corley decided to redesign the Harry Potter series after the look of the classic Penguin book releases from the ’70s. Remarkable work, don’t you think?  I would buy these in a heartbeat (my third set) and read them immediately. Order of the Phoenix is probably my favorite, or Philosopher’s Stone. I’m glad he used the original British title for that first book. So awesome. He mentions on his blog that he contacted Scholastic about his designs, maybe they’ll get a release at some point. Click the book covers to go to Corley’s blog and check out bigger versions of the designs.

Using the same classic Penguin design, Corley also designed new covers for the Lemony Snicket series and the Spiderwick Chronicles books. Here are a few of those.

Fantastic job on these. I really like the stark use of coloring and sparse designs.  Very cool.  Click the images to see the other book covers in the respective series.

Ok, moving from a redesigning of book covers, to a redesigning of movie posters. Let’s take a look at the Flickr set of one Dr Monster.  He’s a graphic artist on Flickr and he’s developing alternative posters for movies. Many of the posters he’s designing are written in French because, well, everything looks cooler written in French. But a few are in English. The designs he’s creating are very cool. Check out a few of my favs.

Here are the posters for Batman, The Terminator and Big Trouble in Little China.  The good Dr said that the Batman poster is not for one specific movie, it’s just a generic design.  I’m loving the Terminator design.  Very eye catching.  He has more on his Flickr site.  Click the images above to go there and revel in posters for Road Warrior and The Thing.

So, we’ve looked at redesigns of both book covers and movie posters. Let’s combine the two, shall we? Next we are going to look at a Flickr set called “I Can Read Movies”. It’s by graphic artist SpaceSick. He has designed a series of books based on popular movies. The book covers are designed in the same vein as the Harry Potter and Spiderwick books above, in the style of Penguin Classics from the ’70s. And to be frank, they rocked my face into orbit. If you got a telescope, pointed it at the sky, you’d see my face, circling the Earth, in orbit. That’s what this series has done to me. He’s made over 20 of these book covers, so let’s take a look at some of my favorites (click the images for a bigger view).

That was just six of the books, I could have put at least 5 more. Go check out SpaceSick’s Flickr set and see all of these most mind-numbingly awesome book covers including Face-Off, Caddyshack, Edward Scissorhands and much, much more.

The whole retro Penguin Classics re-design seems to have caught fire on Flickr. Here are some modern video game covers done in this same Penguin style.

As you can see, there are some very talented graphics designers out there. I spent a week looking around at all the different book/movie cover redesigns. Looking at all of these, I got inspired. I thought I should try my hand at creating a book cover.  I won’t do it in the retro-Penguin style, I’ll just do it in my own style.  I tried to think of something cool so I decided to design the book cover to my autobiography.  What could be cooler or more awesome than that?

So here, for your enjoyment, is the cover to my autobiography, as designed…by me.

Yes, yes, I know. Shark vs Ninja. I just blew your f’n mind.  It’s gotta be hard to wrap your head around how ludicrously awesome that cover is. I had to come up with something that was at least as awesome as my life story. I think I nailed it. Throw in an electric guitar or a killer robot and we may have the Holy Grail of AWESOME. I’m actually tearing up looking at this cover, it’s that beautiful. Like a Monet or a Rockwell. Iconic.

Anyway, enough of that. Work’s been very busy this week, which is why this article is showing up on Friday and not Wednesday or Thursday. Hope you’ve had a good week and I’ll see you next time. Same ninja time, same ninja channel.

This entry was posted on February 20, 2009 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Back to the Future, books, Harry Potter, movies, ninjas, Penguin Classics, pop culture with tags advertising, books, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.