Sit Inside a Story with Books about Town

I've never felt a huge pull to visit London but no wait, everything has changed because this is wonderful. The National Literacy Trust and Wild in Art have combined their wonderful powers to fill the streets of London with storybooks.

Or, storybook benches. Which is basically just as nice.

The benches are part of the Books About Town project, which has installed 50 open book bench sculptures around London for the summer. There are four trails the books have been set up along. Visitors can download maps and answer quizzes for each trail.

The full list of the books that inspired each bench, and the artist who created it, can be found on the Books About Town website.

Can you guess what story is being illustrated without checking the list?

In October the benches will be auctioned off, with proceeds benefiting the National Literacy Trust.

If you don't live in London, you can follow Books About Town on Instagram to see behind-the-scenes process work and the installed benches. Also, on Facebook and Twitter.

What a great project. Love seeing things like this pop up around the world.

via Creative Review

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The magical thing about books...

a book I received for my birthday

My kind of book cover

Chip Kidd's design lessons

Homeschooling has been going quite well and this semester we've decided to add in some fun graphic design and web design lessons.

We're pretty excited.

This obviously meant we needed to read Chip Kidd's GO: A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design. In a kind of wonderful way, the wait list at the library was insane and Amazon was sold out, so we headed down to Mockingbird Books and snagged the last copy they had. Mockingbird was one of the first places I visited when I moved to Seattle and it is just the most perfectly small children's bookstore. (The lesson here is clearly to support your local bookstore first and use megasources as a backup.)

I plan to post a review once we devour this thing, but in the meantime, enjoy the book trailer for GO:

I also recommend Kidd's TED Talk, one of my TED faves for obvious reasons.

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Another great video from a talk Kidd gave

School is cool

How To... uh pretty much anything

School is Cool

I've been helping to homeschool an 8-year-old since September and I have to say it is the greatest part-time job. Ever.

In fact, yesterday, I taught the kid how to cut out an image in Photoshop and place it into the InDesign file for the book he's writing. Basically, my heart burst.

Anyway.

The biggest thing I've learned from homeschooling so far is that school really is cool. And when you have the flexibility of homeschooling, it is pretty easy to get a kid excited about pretty much any subject. Even... math. Yes. Math.

When I saw these prints from KOMBOH I fell in love instantly. Obviously, I love the reading one the most, but there's still room in my life for geography and science. I guess.

You can buy these prints and more from KOMBOH's Society 6 shop.

p.s. I use the Society 6 app for all my iPhone backgrounds. It is awesome.

found via DesignWorkLife

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beautiful storybook posters

the super-simple bookster prints

a fun project from NYPL labs

Open Source Textbooks

College textbooks cost a disgusting amount of money. I didn't even buy half of my books when I was at school and I still spent hundreds of dollars per semester (and of course when you sell those books back you get about $2 total). If you have yet to live through this destruction of your bank account, brace yourself, and hope and pray for open sourcing.

Open textbooks allow students to have a digital copy of the required reading for free, or a printed copy for a price. Especially with the popularity of e-readers and tablets, this just makes sense. Also, lugging a million giant textbooks across campus is such a pain.

I love this graphic from Online Schools that explains the benefits of open source textbooks a lot more sensibly that I can, and is really good looking:

(graph via Edudemic / found via I Love Charts)