Paul, the Executive Creative Director for Penguin presented an amusing and informative look at his work — from early art school paintings to his award winning Penguin book covers. In addition to his own work, Paul introduced the other Penguin creatives and discussed in short detail some of the methods used to arrive at the final designs. All very interesting — especially the designs that were rejected and the reasons for the rejections.

Amusing sidenote: in his correspondence with Robert Crumb, Paul described how Robert doesn’t actually email, but instead scrawls a note on some paper, has his assistant scan it and then emails the jpeg. That works.

What I think is super cool here is the ability to add up to eight background images to a single element in the new CSS3 spec. This opens up a lot of design possibilities without creating messy code. And that’s great. Also much needed. I think/hope this and other CSS3 enhancements will lead to more creative designs that comply with web standards. We’ll see.