Design Work Life: Cataloging Inspiration Daily

I just real­ized that this post didn’t pub­lish when I told it to yes­ter­day. So the whole “Speaking of Penguin” follow-up didn’t make much sense. Ah well, such is life. Here’s the orig­i­nal post…

This web­site is amaz­ing. I heard about it awhile ago, but never got a chance to spend much time explor­ing the con­tent. Published by Penguin Books, We Tell Stories is six sto­ries of dig­i­tal fic­tion told by six authors over six weeks. As a designer heav­ily focused on print, any­thing this inter­ac­tive fas­ci­nates me. Not enough to learn how to do it myself, of course. But still, there’s some pretty cool stuff there.

I was orig­i­nally drawn to the site because of the design work of Nicholas Felton on the story, Hard Times by Matt Mason (shown below — click the images for a larger pic­ture). I own both of his annual reports and I really love his style. This inter­ac­tive piece is just another excel­lent exam­ple of his work.

I also enjoy The 21 Steps, by Charles Cumming.

I don’t know if this is the future of books — I’m still very much attached to hold­ing some­thing solid in my hands — but it sure is pretty cool to play with.