Book Illustration Websites

The internet is an excellent tool for finding inspiration through other’s work. Old book illustrations are often very detailed, beautiful and fascinating. Three of the main websites which feature older book illustrations include: Oldbookillustrations.com, Oldbookart.com and Fromoldbooks.org.

The first website, Oldbookillustrations.com, is actually well organized into galleries titled by subject matter. However, it is a rather small collection of illustrations, and the majority of the images feature the same stiff style and all are in black and white. Although this site is interesting to browse for a few minutes, for richer inspiration look elsewhere.

The next site, Oldbookart.com, features a wider selection of book titles and therefore a wide variety of detailed, full-color illustrations. However, the website itself is quite distracting, with lots of ads, and a very busy layout. Looking through the gallery, it is only possible to sort by book title, however, there are also other categories on the home page that take you to specific topics of books.

Fromoldbooks.org also holds a nice selection of images, however, the original categories are tedious to navigate. On the home page the images are organized into four categories, however these categories are a little vague and each only opens up a long list of titles—which is not very attractive. Although there are a few smaller buttons up top that allow for easier navigation—search and browse—at first these buttons aren’t noticeable. In these selections it is easier to search by topic, size, and source.

Organization really helps a website featuring artwork become successful. It is important for the images to be arranged in a meaningful manner, and categorized so it is easy to find a specific image. While each of these book illustration sites is interesting to some extent, they are either poorly organized or poorly selected. The text and navigation options on each homepage would work better if there were more hierarchy between information. Also, a more attractive and clean web design would benefit usability and also give more attention to the detailed artwork being featured.