Plumptious sparkle.

I've just been sent printed copies of the Cecelia Ahern books I designed for HarperCollins, and they look most appealing.

Stacked in a pile they glitter and sparkle, and if you run your hands over them you can feel the generous embossing. As always with book covers, there are slight changes that have occurred since seeing PDF artwork and the real thing - PS I Love You has completely changed colour - but this is normal and expected and, in this case I think, for the better.

I'm also impressed by how fat the books are - she writes a generous story indeed, a good inch and a half spine if not more, The Gift's spine the slenderest but all in silver foil - so to have these plumptious covers wrapped around them seems only proper.

All that remains is for me to finish reading them! (And design the next one, which I've just got the brief for).

Foil, embossing AND spot varnish?

Just before Christmas I did this REALLY FAST job re-designing Cecelia Ahern's back catalogue, following the publication of her latest 'The Time Of My Life'.

There isn't a lot to say about these apart from it was good to do a whole series in one go, and to walk into a briefing (yeah, I actually WENT there and had a cup of tea! Lovely) and see A3 spreads with each brief on clearly built around my work and way of doing things. That doesn't happen very often - or when it does, you don't get to see it, which can be one of the 'minuses' of working via email. They were done in about a month.

I'm sure they won't mind me showing you one of their briefs, below. The books are published one by one over the coming months, and my favourite is The Book of Tomorrow.

Where you see grey or yellow, by the way - that's silver and gold foil. They're also embossed and spot varnished. That's like CHRISTMAS for an illustrator!