Book Design

In addition to making large prints of my photographs this term, I want to make a book. But where to start? Well, I popped over to the library to find some inspiration. While I thought I would pick from mountains of gorgeous design books or piles of contemporary books about art, I actually chose a retrospective book as well as a book about public monuments.

Jonathan P. Binstock's Sam Gilliam: a retrospective

The first book I found was a retrospective put together by Jonathan P. Binstock. The bleed on the cover is beautiful and richly colored. Also, I love the flush spine and the matte finish to the exterior of the book. When you open it, the book reads very much like any art history text book, but I must say that I love the treatment of the images. It seems very appropriate that, in a retrospective book, each piece floats in its own white space rather than doing bleeds of the images. Bleeds always suggest to me a certain contemporaneousness of the work. The images are slightly glossy, but definitely not matte finish. Overall, the design is clean, simple, and easily scanned by readers looking for a specific work.

The second book I found, Monuments for the USA,  was produced by the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. It is a catalogue of suggestions for monuments and public sculpture throughout the United States. I also really liked the matte cover of this book, even though the work within is of questionable quality at best. The way images inside the book are presented made me want to read through the entire book. There was a sense of randomness since there were so many different formats going on, but there was a rhythm that persisted through that madness.

Both of these books are at a scale that I'd want to print my work at, so I'll be interested to see which format influences my decisions more.