In Graphis Magazine 336, Ellen Lupton paints Carin Goldberg as a woman “armed with a nimble sense of humor and a knack for the beautiful.” Lupton could have easily been describing Goldberg’s master book designs.
While dynamically designed book covers are commonplace in today’s market, the craft was often overlooked before the 1980s and 1990s. It was then that a handful of designers, including Goldberg, reinvented the field.
Over the past two decades, Carin Goldberg designed hundreds of book jackets for all the major American publishing houses, including Simon & Schuster, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Harper Collins, Doubleday, and Hyperion, and dozens of album covers for record labels such as Warner Bros., Motown, Nonesuch, Interscope, and EMI.
The breadth of her work covers artists as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Dvorák, and Madonna. Her book jacket for the 1986 reissue of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” has become an icon of postmodern design.
Carin Goldberg was born in New York City and studied at the Cooper Union School of Art. She worked as a staff designer at CBS Television, CBS Records, and Atlantic Records before establishing her own firm, Carin Goldberg Design, in 1982. Her work has garnered hundreds of awards.
To see more of Carin Goldberg’s work, click here.
