Peter Mendelsund

My feeling has always been that I have learned more about design by looking around me carefully (observing life, collecting impressions of the visual culture all around) than I would have learned in academia. Designers should naturally be visual magpies- amassing images, storing them, thinking hard about why some are beautiful and some are not, assimilating these lessons and putting them to work. If you don't have that urge, maybe design is the wrong field for you.

Peter Mendelsund, a self-taught designer, specializes in bookcover design. He is an art director at Vertical Press, and a senior designer at Knopf. I have noticed his book covers while spending my best days this summer in Barnes & Noble or the local library (specifically, I was drawn to Trauma, and considered reading it because of the design). Although his website is "coming soon", I still found the preview page to be interesting, like a teaser that still managed to showcase a bit of his work. You can view his blog here, and there's a great interview with Chris Tobias featured on Design Related.