UPDATE: Machine Man

So back in May I had the pleasure of doing an interview with the wonderful Matt Roeser about his project New Cover. A few days after I posted the interview, it was announced that Max Barry was letting people vote on the cover of his next book, "Machine Man", and that a few of Matt's designs were in the running (CLICK HERE for that post).

And finally, after much waiting Vintage & Anchor has announced which design had the most votes. Not surprisingly, it was one of Matt's.

Congrats to Matt and hooray for a nice little experiment in the publishing world.

Machine Man

The internet is such a huge space, and yet it seems to get smaller each day. For example, I saw this great post on the Vintage & Anchor blog about Max Barry's upcoming book "Machine Man". Apparently the publisher gave him permission to have Reddit users vote on the cover design, which is super rare and also super awesome.

The crazy "it's a small world after all" part is that three of the covers (1 & 2 & 5) were designed by Matt Roeser, who I interviewed earlier this week. I love pixel art and think Matt did a great job using it on the first cover:

I also really enjoy cover 3 but I think it would have been better to have illustrated knuts, bolts and legs instead of actual pictures cut out:

Quite honestly, the only covers I'm not crazy about are 4 & 6 but I would be happy to see the rest in print. In fact, I'm having a hard time picking a favorite. If you're interested you should head over to Reddit and let Max know which cover you'd like to see on shelves.

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INTERVIEW: Matt Roeser

I'm not sure which came first, my adoration for Matt Roeser's New Cover project or my love for his LOST re-watch site. But since this is a book blog, I'll just be covering the first in this post.

New Cover is based on a pretty simple idea: Matt creates a new cover for each book he reads. He has yet to have a book cover published, but after positive feedback from people in the industry, he hopes to have his first published cover soon. New Cover has really inspired me to continue working on my own personal projects and to always keep creating, so I was really excited when Matt agreed to do an interview with me about his own design process and his views on book cover design.

ALAINA: So how did New Cover get started?

MATT: Since I was a child, I've always enjoyed reading and in high school and college, I fell in love with graphic design. In the back of my mind, designing covers for books has always been a sort of dream job for me as it melds these two passions. After graduating college, I went to work for Atomicdust, a graphic design agency in St. Louis. For the past five years, I’ve been making creative matter with them, and a few months ago, I decided that if i'm going to pursue my dream of cover design, I would need to actually focus on creating some covers.

So, I started taking some of my favorite books and giving them the covers I thought they deserved. As a lover of these books, nothing would bum me out more than someone walking past one of these titles in a bookstore because it happened to get stuck in a poorly designed cover. Thus, New Cover was born and my mantra was simple: I read books and then design new covers for them.

My interview with Matt is a little bit long, but he has some great advice and some great insight on the design industry. So if you have any interest in books or design or humans I encourage you to click through the jump to read more (if you don't like any of those you're probably lying).

Also be sure to check out New Cover for yourself.