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Thursday, January 24, 2008

Here Comes Everybody, US and UK

Designer names to come

The author of Here Comes Everybody wrote a guest post over at The Penguin Blog. It's brief but well worth reading if you like thinking about the power and limits of social media, user-generated content, and blogging.

The American cover (directly below) strikes me as a little bit too literal, and to be perfectly honest, the photo makes me think of well-dressed, very well-behaved kids in the pit at a concert that I would never want to attend.


The UK cover (below) is conceptually much stronger, recognizing that no matter how silly some social media content is, all of it is a public declaration of what one believes to be true, or relevant, or funny, or...whatever. If it's worth posting to You Tube, it's worth putting a new pin about it on your messenger bag too.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The UK cover seems more graphically and conceptually well conceived. It's rad how they were able to print those buttons. It would be even more amazing if they found them all (which I kind of doubt). A Jon Gray cover struck me as very similar: http://www.gray318.com/images/final%20jackets/large%20files/things-my-girl--large.gif

Joseph said...

I forgot about that Gray cover. Love it.

Katie Alender said...

On a gut level, I prefer the US cover. The concept of the herd. I don't know if that conveys the book, though.

Anonymous said...

The UK cover is nice. I like it more for the fact that someone went out of there way to really go for all the buttons and think them through. Bravo. Not sure if that solved the problem though. It is hard to read the title and once you do you sort of feel hippied-out and expect to open a book about hippie propaganda or the wonderful world of pins.

On that note, I agree with Katie. The US cover seems more appropriate—conceptually weak, but appropriate. I would still rather have the UK cover on my shelf though...

Pj said...

Totally, different! The US cover seem to explain matter in the book better than UK. About organized-unorganized.