Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter

It always delights me when I come across a fab­u­lous book cov­er design (I’ll be doing a round-up soon…), and, while the below images are not from a book cov­er, the design is just great, and it’s in Hebrew, so it kind of counts…right? And, maybe some­one will com­mis­sion her to design a book cov­er next!

Tsil­li Pines is the design­er behind Alef Bet­ty: Mod­ern Hebrew Arts, and her work is beau­ti­ful. On her blog she shares the inspi­ra­tion for her Hebrew alpha­bet posters:

I was 6 years old when my fam­i­ly moved from Israel to Berke­ley, Cal­i­for­nia, so both Hebrew and Eng­lish were spo­ken in our house. My broth­er and I each had a Hebrew alpha­bet poster from Israel hang­ing in our rooms when we were grow­ing up.

There are some inter­est­ing words in this poster. Words like lone­ly” and ill­ness” along­side more benign words like artist” and tall.”

It’s hard to imag­ine some­one design­ing a lan­guage poster now with words like that. But it was good for me to be sur­round­ed by this wide range of let­ters and words. It made me won­der about life.

I spent a lot of my child­hood look­ing at this poster, and I real­ized recent­ly that I want­ed to design a dif­fer­ent kind of poster. I want­ed to make some­thing with the Hebrew alpha­bet, but I want­ed it to be modern.

Read more about her sto­ry here, and vis­it her shop and web­site here.

It’s always nice to end the week with great design.


Orig­i­nal­ly from Lan­cast­er, Penn­syl­va­nia, Nao­mi is the CEO of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil. She grad­u­at­ed from Emory Uni­ver­si­ty with degrees in Eng­lish and Art His­to­ry and, in addi­tion, stud­ied at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don. Pri­or to her role as exec­u­tive direc­tor and now CEO, Nao­mi served as the found­ing edi­tor of the JBC web­site and blog and man­ag­ing edi­tor of Jew­ish Book World. In addi­tion, she has over­seen JBC’s dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives, and also devel­oped the JBC’s Vis­it­ing Scribe series and Unpack­ing the Book: Jew­ish Writ­ers in Conversation.