From Comedy Central to AIGA

Looking for inspiration in making my science book for typography class, I went to the AIGA website. Not looking for anything that I would actually recognize, I found one of the winners for the 2008 Design Awards in Book Design. Lo and behold it was Stephen Colbert's "I am America, and So Can You!." The design firm, Doyle Partners, was praised in the following way:

"We think of this project not so much as one of book design, but rather more along the lines of a typographic brain transplant. Doyle Partners served merely as midwives to the volcano of acuity that is Stephen Colbert’s mind. The book, like the character, had to be completely saturated with self­aggrandizement (hence the radiant Colbert case binding and the endpaper pattern of Stephen confronting himself) and self­importance (like the almost life­size head on the cover). No surface of the book could escape being drenched in his ego, which led to the idea of the Republican­red edge staining. The reference stickers validate the book as something that the reader will return to time after time, and the stickers for nominating other books for the Stephen Colbert Award for the Literary Excellence was our lighthearted attempt at benign bookstore vandalism. Long live the values of the Colbert Nation!"

I have to agree with AIGA. This satirical novel did an amazing job in representing everything that Colbert was trying to say. From the images to the type itself, they did Colbert and the American nation proud.

To see more of AIGA's Design Award Winners, click here.