Détournement all over again
These sleeves, while amusing unto themselves, are even funnier when you know that their designer, New York-based Nikolay Saveliev, produced twenty copies of each (140 sleeves total) and released them into the wild. Visual remixes of this kind are fairly common among waggish designers and particularly students, but what sets these apart is not their pitch-perfect execution (Saveliev strikes just the right balance between the broad visual metaphors favored by academic presses and the "good enough" execution produced by working within an environment limited by budget and bureaucracy) but the acuity of the writing. "Importance of Efficiency of Specialization, Tonight"? "Magnetism Against the Lactic Euphemism"? Freaking awesome. A superb example of writing as design, assuming that Saveliev did it, which—given the perfect aridity of the illustration—I suspect. Via iso50.