 Laura's made books for artists and institutions at the new museum, but she also works independently. And she's someone that collects and appreciates beautiful books as kind of objects. So thank you and let's welcome Laura. Can everyone hear me if I'm speaking like this? Okay. Thank you, you and Jay, for that. Right. So I'm going to speak about the book as physical object today. So we'll talk about size format stock, talk about printing methods, special processes, and then I'm going to share with you some of my, the books that I designed in my own practice. So first this quote by Ulysses Carrion, the book, a book is a sequence of spaces. So books, if I could just wax poetic for a second coming from architecture, I would, I like to think that books are spatial, that they're sequences with beginnings, middles, middles and ends, that they have infinite possible paths that can navigate, that we can navigate through them. Books are physical objects, books are sequences of spaces. This is a quote from the artist Oliver Larix, 2010 work versions. For the first time several months ago, I spent hours looking at the facade of the cathedral, but only when I bought a book on the cathedral a week later did I really see it. What I hope to allow you to see is that books can sometimes be as architectural as architecture, through the use of materials, construction and all sorts of physical properties, books and body ideas and their sequences and materiality, each a new world and new space on its own. So let's start with size format and stock. When we talk about size, one easy way to talk about size is by these sort of common sizes that we all know. So we all know a paperback, a biography, an art catalog, a magazine and many of us know interview magazine which would fall in an oversized category. So sometimes when you're thinking about the size of a book that you want to make, you can think about it in terms of what size it falls on the spectrum, because sometimes when you make something the size of a paperback, it will automatically clue the reader in that it has a certain kind of paperbackish vibe. So actually the biography in this image is not actually a biography at all, it's an artist's catalog. So this is an example of this artist's catalog sort of inverting the notion of common sizes. It appears as if it's her biography, but in actuality if you open this book up it would be just plates of her paintings. So Ben touched on this, but I wanted to mention this book which is a good reference if you're interested in typography, page proportion, etc. It's called The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Brinkhurst. And basically he goes into a lot of discussion about the proportion of books and he created this chromatic scale of page proportions, which is based on kind of like a musical chromatic scale. But in doing this he found that certain proportions again kind of clue the reader into a certain kind of aesthetic or even time period. So the proportion from width to height if it's a fifth or a fourth ratio corresponds to a lot of books from the Middle Ages, whereas a sixth and seventh proportion corresponds to a lot of books from the Renaissance. So books from different times also have different proportions, so if you're interested in that that's a whole other kind of study that you can start to research. And then the right is a note that I wanted to make to you because some of you are working on projects that have a certain kind of geometry. And let's say geometry is so important to your project, it could actually become the way in which you construct a book or construct the proportion of a page so that your architecture is literally embedded in the page itself and the book itself. I'm going to mention some of these. I'm not really sure how much you know, so I'm going to kind of go over things that I think would be useful. So in terms of binding, you could do like a perfect binding where the book is cut and then glued into the cover. There's something called sewn signatures which if you look at a lot of books and some books here you'll notice that the pages are folded and curved around and then glued to the spine and that is indicative of a commercial printing process and like a large offset press. These bindings you can do at like a local copy shop or a local printer or you can also do them yourself in many instances. Japanese binding which is a stitch form of binding, stud or screw binding or a spiral binding. This is a really simple binding method and a lot of the complex object books that you may have looked at on this table actually use this method which is saddle stitch so it's just pages are folded and then stapled together and if you look at it from the bottom cross section it's just pages folded and nested in one another. You can also do a singer sewn binding which you would need a commercial printer for. It looks like a sewing machine and you can also do a three hole sewn which you can find out how to make that stitch if you googled it online. So in terms of paper sizes, there's the international standard paper sizes which are sort of all nested into each other which many of you may know like A2, A3, A4. In the US it's kind of a bit not as nice so you know it's like eight and a half by 11, 11 by 17 and then sort of like all hell breaks loose but in terms of designing your own things maybe in school it's important to note that a lot of things can be done using an eight and a half by 11 or 11 by 17 which will make your life sort of easier in some ways which we'll talk about. There's also something that we won't go into too much detail about but it's important if you want to start making a lot of books and that's something called paper grain. So like this table is wood and it has it has fibers running a certain direction so does paper. So paper has a grain that runs in a certain direction and so this is grain long and usually in paper notation the second number is the grain so this is eight and a half by 11 grain going on the 11 and that's 11 by eight and a half grain short going eight and a half and why that's important is let's say that you wanted to make a booklet and so you wanted to fold the booklet. If you fold along the grain it's going to fold really nicely sharp precisely and the book will be soft like nice to hold nice to flip through it'll be kind of floppy I don't know if you've ever held a book that feels really stiff versus a book that feels soft and floppy the soft and floppy it doesn't happen unless the grain is going parallel to the spine. So you don't need to know necessarily but for some of you that are interested in materiality this might be kind of a fascinating thing to explore for you. I also wanted to give you some reference points I'm not exactly sure how helpful this is but if you're looking for paper paper companies and these are URLs you can take a screenshot spring hills like a cheaper copy paper type thing papers come in all different colors Mohawk Mina French those are American brands of paper and you can get paper but and a good a place that I use a lot is this place called gloden.com and what it is is it has all of these paper vendors but you can go on there and select small quantities and you can you can have them cut it so you can have your paper grain running whatever direction you want so you can get small quantities and custom cut which is useful if you're making a book. So basic paper types there's basically like uncoated and coated other than that you have like textured and there's thousands of different texture papers you have metallic some of you saw this this book up here which is I think it's a metallic paper sometimes it's hard to tell because it'll be like a foil it'll be a normal paper and then a foil over top but I think this is a metallic paper and then there's even special things so there's fabric papers there's plastic based papers you can even print on Tyvek and use Tyvek and making books and there's a bunch of different methods so you guys probably have a laser printer and an inkjet printer there's also you can do silk screener riso and on the commercial side you can do all of those things as well but you can also do embossing debossing foil stamps letterpress and offset which we're gonna I'm gonna show you some examples of those coming up and then this I thought this might be helpful for you like different ways of commercial printing if you end up wanting to go that route ever so print on demand there's like mix and lulu blurb and this place in the midwest called bookmobile that's they're really helpful about making books commercial like small scale commercial printers you probably know ones up here but ones near the new museum for me this place called expert printing they can print digitally they can print offset it's small enough scale that it's not too costly if you want to do something in offset this place called post heritage and then if you want riso printing there's a place called textbooks in brooklyn and then big big big commercial printers which you may not use but a place called lingo that does broadsheet newspapers and a place called ghp and grand meridian so I want to speak about a few books whose formats are determined by their content because how we started this was sometimes you can choose a format based on a stereotype of what that format should be it's a biography so it's six by nine or it's a paperback so it's four by seven inches but another way is to look at the content first and allow the content to shape the the object of the book so this is a book called chute diary it's a collection of snapshots of the artist designer tadanori yoko and they all the snapshots were taken by a photographer named tadashi karahashi and the book encapsulates one year from 1970 to 1980 so it has an obi in obi band but if you take that off you quickly realize that the cover holds two snapshots and then if you flip through the book every single page is the exact same it it has space for two for two snapshots per page and a caption for each so in this way the format of the book is based on the snapshot and the orientation of the photos determined is determined by how they fit best on the page so if it's a portrait then it gets rotated 90 degrees to become a landscape so everything becomes a landscape and if you look at the book from the front the fore edge sort of gives away this the structure and conceit of the book which is a year of or 10 years of photographs two per page for as long as they run this is a book called your land my land and the book was made based off an exhibition of artist jonathan horowitz and also just to note the names and the parentheses are not authors those are designer designers if you're interested so the this book was designed by jeff hon it was based on an exhibition by the artist jonathan horowitz and the exhibition was about the 2012 presidential election so one of the exhibition components was an interactive website that posted on social media the twitter feed for both obama and romney like simultaneously and that website was what this book is based on so when you open up the book it's a twitter feed it's a continuous twitter feed so obama is on the left and romney is on the right and colored for their parties and then cut in between these feeds are essays and other commentary and i think the dimension of the book is determined somehow by the dimension of twitter unlike some sort of standard screen that they were they were showing the website on in the gallery so i think the dimension is very much like locked into how this was served in the actual exhibition and so what's interesting is that if you see the the book straight on it looks purple right it's a blend of red and blue but if you look at it from another direction it looks the fore edge looks red and if you look at it from the other direction it looks blue and so you can't really ever get away from seeing these things concurrently or seeing them together and this is a nice example of a book with an only image cover and so certainly affects how you see the book from here on out and this is an exhibition catalog from 2008 for the new museum and actually i think one of their most subtly radical exhibition catalogs that they've ever made so the exhibition was called after nature and it was um it surveyed a landscape of wilderness and ruins darkened by uncertain catastrophe it is a story of abandonment regression and rapture um but it shared this it shared the name of the book by wb wg sabal um and so the designer connie pertle decided that actually he wouldn't design a catalog at all he would buy a thousand mass market paperback books of wg sabal and then his catalog design would be um a dust jacket that would wrap around this mass market paperback um so if you open the dust jacket revealing the front cover and the back cover you see this this blue which is the exhibition um acknowledgments and um curatorial essay and then if you unwrap the cover from the front you sort of have the list of artists and then you have all the object labels and all the description of the works um this book is sort of hard to describe because it's it's design is so embedded and it's in its format and almost um so subtle but it's on it's on the table so i encourage you to look at it after um but basically this book is called tupac and biggie and it presents a visual history of dana lixonberg's iconic photographs of tupac and biggie so what's interesting about this is it's just a single signature saddle stitch and um the first half of the book is all images of tupac and then the second half of the book is all images of biggie so here the center spread is um the photographs featured in the book were commissioned by vibe magazine in 1993 and 1996 and um they've been iconic and they've been seen in a lot of places but so it sort of all emanates from there and so the when you open it the center spread is that these two vibe magazine covers are kind of like they're both together but then other than that pages 32 through 64 are all biggie and page one through 32 is all tupac so it's sort of like acknowledging that the format the signature is acknowledging them as separate and then bringing them together so now um we're going to talk a bit about printing methods and i think this is a um kind of massive massive topic um but i'm gonna share with you some things that i think are helpful so um screen color is rgb and printing when we're printing most of the time especially if you're using a laser printer you're printing in cm yk color space so the rgb model is additive which means that like red light green light and blue light are added together and if you if you add them all together you get white which is in the middle of that balloon but cm yk is subtractive meaning that um if you print cyan and magenta and yellow and black all on top of each other you get black um so in i think um it sounds obvious but i think uh this could help you know understand why people are like well you can you can't print white no you can't print white unless it's like an actual white ink because cm yk it will only get um darker it can't really get lighter and this is an example uh it might be hard to see on screen but this is an image in rgb versus cm yk so in the left image the grapes are almost pure green and the right is a conversion to cm yk so you see how especially in that area in particular it gets dull so i think it's it's good to just understand that you're working a lot in screen based media you're working a lot with renderings but a lot of that um doesn't necessarily translate to print um with printing on a laser printer for instance um so on the left is your laser printer um and on the right is a commercial offset press and i think it's super uh interesting to see this if you've never seen it but a commercial offset press will um there's a plate for each c cm y and k and um your press sheet will like go through all four kind of drums and get printed on each plate um and a commercial printer though can also print with spot colors and like pan tone colors so we'll talk about that in a second so this is um an illustration of if we were to take this image of this poor dog and separate it into cm yk this is maybe what if you printed each plate individually this is what the plates would look like so you can tell because the image is so red that there's a lot of magenta and there's a lot of yellow because in order to make red you have to have magenta and yellow and then this would be if you were adding them together so you start with c then you have cyan and magenta then you add yellow to get the red right and then you add black to get all the dark parts of the image and this is another one that's like less obvious but just like a normal scene so you start out with the cyan then you go to the magenta and you get like the brake lights and the traffic cones and then once you have yellow you can have things like green trees and then the black again fills in all of the the high contrast areas of the dark areas um so more printing methods so in addition to cm yk printing um in commercial offset printing you have the option of using spot colors so um pan tone colors um on the left there's like thousands of pan tone colors maybe hundreds i'm not sure um there's pan tone metallics you can't really see the metallic but it's sort of like if you print it on gloss paper and hold to the light it will like shine then there's uh reso which is basically looks like a small uh laser printer but it's using spot color ink so it's basically like if you combine screen printing with a laser printer you would have reso and reso has a ton of different inks and it sort of looks like pan tones but it's sort of more like dirty and unfinished and there's a book of uh reso prints here if you'd like to see the quality because they're quite beautiful um and then foils so there's also hundreds of different metallic foils that you can stamp and use um in commercial printing um so now i'm going to talk about some books in which uh they use color and other um printing methods to kind of uh convey the conceptual nature of the book so this is um an ambiguous case in its casco issue 11 so basically this book was about addressing the subject of openness so that includes ambivalence and ambiguity so how can a book be both ordered and ambiguous at the same time well in this case it's another saddle stitch book but um it's like a set of nested saddle stitch books that can come out of each other and and be nested back into each other um so that's sort of like the disorder of it but then there's an ordering strategy which is color so each book from on the front side of the book goes from purple to red and on the back side of the little booklet it goes from purple to blue so if you dump them out and and kind of leave them all over the place then you can always put them back together based on the color code and even inside color is used to distinguish voice so here's an interview between two people that carries the red versus blue color i think um this book is a really good example of how to use color coding in a really precise and simple way so this is the center cultural swiss archive book that spans three years 2007 2008 and 2009 and the book is an archive for the institution over three years um but in order to distinguish for three years the only the only thing that they do is to use like a different color so all of the images spanning three years and the entire book are all treated the same way they all sort of have this like low fidelity photocopy look they're all black and white everything is black and white except the information that organizes it that ties it to a specific time and place so page number caption date author etc all of that info is color coded to a year so orange is 2007 um green is 2008 and purple is 2009 um this is a book uh ben showed the cover of it as well as it as an example of an image cover um this is really another fascinating use of color to communicate an idea about the content um so this book is called birds of paradise costume as cinematic spectacle and it looks at early cinema and silent cinema from 1910 1920 um and the movie industry is sometimes called the silver screen right so um this book brings that aspect to life so it has um sections of black pages and all of the printing on the black pages is in silver and i encourage you to check it out because it's hard to show in a slide but um it's on the table here but basically the designer lorenz bruner uh developed with a printer a way to print four color but using also silver as a as a base for for what would be the light parts or white parts of an image so it's sort of like silver metallic ink mixed with um probably cmy or other colors um and so it's like it's a four color mix that i think is completely custom to to this book and the kind of black and white images that aren't color are just pure silver ink and i think the intent was to simulate the flickery filmic aspect and the sparkle of these early uh early cinematic um experiences this is the reso graphic printing guide by color library it's also on the table and this gives you a sense of uh what it's like to print in reso so reso it has like a whole set of spot colors um you know like 20 colors that you can choose from depending on what printer you find um again there's that printer in brooklyn that you could um ask if you wanted to investigate this kind of printing um but this this book explores the same image through every single page except using different spot colors or different reso duo tones or quad tones or tritones so basically you can take any image and you can break it down into two colors three colors four colors and um it has like a certain kind of effect on the outcome of what you get max samaj is a studio in switzerland and they're super interested and adept at printing methods imaging colors and more and i want to show you this this book that's also on the table that if you flip through it you would see that it's just colors just looks like this it starts off with two colors three colors then four colors and five colors and um what they say about this book is that it's a tool for designers starting with between two and five spot colors and adjusting hue and tone live on an offset press the book is organized in these custom colors as as they were mixed live on press two colors then three then four then five 120 combinations of ink were tested the book contains 450 spot colors that evolved over printing a total of 500 books and each book is slightly different so i wanted to show you like a quick video of of of it because you'll understand sort of like what an offset press is and then how you could uh sort of like affect the process of it whoa that's if we just go lighter the lemon yellow warm red cool red we had blue with two different dirty stuff inside what are the dirty stuff dirty is always you don't know how dirty you are so it's not the correct glue right right now but actually the you see that the undercollar has an input of the and the the black makes it more toward towards the green it shows the image positive and then it goes over the color and the paper runs here and the adding of the color here if you add color it always take half of the color away so they were just mixing those colors just like live on site so that um that dark blue that went to light blue then it became light blue in that book and there's another book there's many other books somewhere out there that have all the variations in between of that blue another of printing methods is edge printing so on the left uh artist cocktails by ryan gander it looks like the edge is printed but it's actually not it's just spot colors that are printed and to the edge and cut and so then you see them on the edge um then you have examples of paint painted edges so like black sun or frankenstein set sometimes the book is literally clamped down and sprayed with a color um the book that I designed uh in the middle it's gilded and that's also on the table so they squeeze the book together and then the iron on like a gold foil um and that's usually how gilding is done and then the book on the far right is another book that I did which is actually printed so it's two color printed it's printed with copper ink and black ink on the edge um so more special processes um there's tip-ins so you can um make a something to insert in the book and like kind of glue it in there um there's like a fold out so many of you have probably seen fold outs um in books I think there's a dillerska video run for a book that's all fold outs uh which is interesting there's like die cutting uh so you literally like cutting a hole in the book or like making an alternate shape um and then there's varying page lengths which were which were also about to look at um so this is a book that has an alternative shape it's called the public architecture school brussels designed by Jeff Hahn and this is a book for an architecture school and um I think I asked Jeff about it once and he said well it's an architecture school so it's in perspective so like playing on the idea of like making something in perspective or three dimensional because that's sort of like your territory um but it's it's also so it's angled at a seven degree angle and it's also here on the table too um and why a seven degree angle I think the printer I think it was printed in China and the printer that was the maximum angle that he could do and keep the sewn signature construction intact um so that's an interesting limitation that was found in making this object and then when you open it up the text and the images are kind of conforming to this perspectival shape so it sort of has this like really intense force perspective but in actuality um it's kind of it's it's like kind of very flat so as an interesting uh illusory aspect to it um this is a book also on the table it's really hard to understand um so I would encourage you to um hold it as an object but it's called a well-respected man or book of echoes and um sorry I want a that's like a leftover note of like can I photograph this um it's really I really tried to photograph it it's really hard so I would um encourage you to look at it but um basically it's a book of reverberating voices as they describe it or conversations about a very specific post-colonial condition in the Netherlands so many texts reference the same Dutch literary piece so it's a bunch of people having conversation about the same thing and so there's this idea of echoing so um how do you reflect echoing reverberation and conversation and in this case again it's a saddle stitch uh with a cover over it but there's a bunch of different page lengths so when you open it from the front cover on the left you get a set of cascading uh table of contents and if you open it from the back you also get a set of cascading table of contents um and then further in each section the page length is short or wide uh this is the first page open of the very narrow section and everything of course has to conform to that format so now you have a single column of narrow text and you have this very landscape image that in order to be kind of like big and visible has to be rotated to fit on this kind of narrow column um this is a book that was uh brought to my attention by Minhee who will be speaking next um it's called Pre-Columbian Art in New York and it was designed by Keith Goddard in 1969 I think um it's a book of selections of works from the Museum of Primitive Arts Collection um from a certain period of time in 1969 it's also constructed as a single signature and it has two different papers and they're two different lengths so you can see from the bottom the side view it has this white paper that's pretty short and this brown paper that's uh longer and so what do those two different page lengths um offer in this scenario and in this scenario it's really fascinating because sort of like on the the longer paper it's all of the details about the works like the object labels materials um all of that kind of like administrative information that museums hold and then on the interior shorter cut paper it's sort of the collection sort of this like nice space where the collection could live um and what's even cooler is that Keith Goddard built um like a scale so that when the pages line up together there's a scale going and you can kind of like have a sense of how big these objects are in actual in actual life um so I thought it's sort of interesting to think like in your case like how do you uh explain or show scale of your work this is a book of essays called Amateur and um I wanted to bring it up quickly because it's another sort of like architectural move of um of um page cutting so the book is like a normal textbook it's like white paper black text and then all of a sudden every so often every like increment of time you have these interruptions of black paper black printed pages that are actually cut horizontally across the middle um so what does that do well that allows the reader to flip flop and re-sequence them as they will in any order that you desire and so the idea being that the reader is an amateur editor of these editorial sequences so in the book amateur you become the amateur editor by the way this is so flexible this is a catalog of work for and again sorry about that um this is a catalog of work for sculptor Gabriel Currie um and his work is typically associated with um value commerce and the banal poetry of consumer goods and objects so this is a book designed by Ocarim for an exhibition called Sorted and Resorted in which the artist used materials to organize his works in his show um and he sorted his works in the show into four categories paper plastic metal and construction um and so following that logic the catalog is also designed in four sections um paper plastic metal and construction it's also on the table it also has this um swiss binding where like it's a hardcover but you take it off and it's sort of not the spine is not adhered to the book block so that's sort of an interesting thing to look at so here are the four sections so these are designed on the predominant based on the predominant materials and the artist sculptures but then those materials become translated to the book so the metal section starts with metallic paper or metallic printed paper the plastic section starts with a synthetic coated paper the paper section is like the paper so thin and see-through that it really I guess shows its paperness maybe was the idea um and then the construction section is like this very um soft almost fabric like paper like almost like um insulation or something so um I'm going to talk about some of my work now and some of the things that I do correspond to some of the things I've been talking about and others not but you know when it's your own project things sort of like ebb and flow and come in and come out um so as Yoon Jae mentioned I am the senior designer at the new museum and uh sometimes we do exhibition catalogs with artists this was from 2018 uh it was an exhibition called Nathaniel Miller's Progressive Rocks and this is a gallery that I designed for the for the exhibition um so maybe a note about what Ben mentioned is in this case especially for a museum sometimes I think a an only typographic cover is um really effective because there's so much visual information in the museum already and um in terms of images I want the person in the museum to be looking at the actual art in the space not a piece of art that I'm putting on a cover of a publication so this one was typographic it's a typeface drawn by my friend Matt Wolfe and I created three alternate o's for this typeface because the title is called Progressive Rocks so the o's become the rocks and they're progressing um down the cover computer you would better tell me everything right now or I'm going to hack you so that was the exhibition and it's sort of important to establish the environment because the materials of the publication are in direct response to that environment so the exhibition with this giant talking robotic egg it was sort of all in the dark and the only light in the exhibition was coming from um from the either the animation work or the film work or like this egg spotlight um it also what is also important materially is some of the work in the exhibition like this so the exhibition was so visceral there was this guy vomiting in the corner every 30 seconds um and so the fact that it was dark and the fact that there was a lot of vomit associated gave kind of was the reason why we ended up with this color and this color is a four color build so it's a neon it's like neon so instead of cmyk it's neon blue neon pink neon yellow and black um and what that it does a lot of things but one thing it does is it makes it glow in the dark so that was good because of the exhibition being in the dark and then second it was this vomit color so it was kind of this gross um color which was perfect kind of for nathaniel millers um i like using kind of dumb system fonts um and his work is really probing at our understanding of um ourselves and our differences and he uses a lot of neanderthals in his work and he sort of puts them as scholarly figures instead of dumb um uh species which we typically associate them with so i wanted to use kind of a dumb font throughout so i use arial rounded bold which i was like one of my favorite fonts um and then you know it's like a typical exhibition guide so one side is a poster that um nathaniel made and then we decided we would like dip it in that vomit color so his uh artwork is sort of like um yeah like really dipped in that color and then on the other side all of the information that you desperately need to know is in is in that color so that is glowing in the dark when you're in the in the dark exhibition and then all the other stuff like the uh you know extended labels and stuff like that is like um on white paper because it's not as um crucial um sometimes i draw maps for exhibitions this one ended up being kind of silly and like completely out of scale um and this is a preview of what what the ink looks like in the dark so it was um it really kind of worked like you could read it in the dark which was nice and what was also nice is um nathaniel miller's wife wore a matching shirt to the exhibition and then so we made him like more tour shirts um with the typeface and the poster and it was mostly because we kept thinking about this title progressive rocks and it has a title of like rocks progressing but it also has this rock concert sort of vibe where it's like progressive rocks um so that was the impetus behind the tour tour t-shirt um this is a a book that i designed in 2018 also um it's called how we see photo books by women and it's cataloging um 200 or more photo books by women or non-gender non-binary binary photographers um and this it's hard to see but this is all silver ink so everything you see that's gray is silver metallic ink whoa um this is like an adventure presentation so okay so in this case why am i using why am i using silver ink so in this case the conceptual link was that i was considering early photography and film and the chemical technologies and development and how silver was used in this process so developing film includes like these silver halide crystals and i got like really involved in that and i thought like okay the whole idea of this book is that there is a whole set of folks that are under have been underwritten and under recognized in the field of photography so let's like expose them so let's use this material for exposure to like bring them to the forefront um these are so the back cover is just all the names and again just like bringing the names of these figures um to the cover and the inside is really really simple it's almost encyclopedic and the idea for me was to make it as clear as possible as usable as possible as a reference um there is one thing though silver ink is on every single page and it's impossible to see but everywhere you see a drop shadow like this this faint shadow around the image and around every single image in the book is all silver ink and so that was a way for me to kind of create this like small but subtle gesture throughout the book and again really clear every photographer has a full spread there's a bunch of navigational systems like tabbing systems i don't think that's a good rag by the way just saying that um and then so if you unfold the cover you see the images and you see all the photographers name but if you look inside the flaps if you kind of look in the space that has been under looked or under recognized then you see all of the books um by all of the photographers and it was another way to kind of like get at that idea of like really revealing this cast of characters who should be should actually be center stage so um this is my thesis book from Yale and it's an example the cover is the one on the right the back cover is the white one but the book is an index and so the index is on the front cover in the back cover and um all it is is an index of 81 projects that I did when I was in school chronologically from one to 81 and I think sometimes that's a good way to organize a book sometime when you don't know how else to organize it um so how did I put my books in a book so this is a book that I designed in this book and so most of the books that I designed are just in there like spine lined up to spine and they're just full scale so however big they actually were in real life is how big they are in the book um so in the back of in the the back of the book is where all the writing and descriptions are and all the reference materials and um thinking about indexing I took stock of all the colors that I used in my work and I figured out that actually it was sort of like a four color build it was blue um hot pink gold and black so uh color library who I've um shown you their reso book color library made with me a custom four color profile that is those colors and so at various points in the book um we stop and we look at the works uh re reprinted in this like new um four color build and so these works looked slightly different um in actuality but in the book they look as if they're seen through the lens of these colors that I use most often and then of course um I there's this idea of this book is like a floppy paperback but then there's this other element of um of uh the gesture of of formality so for me I like the contrast between those two things and so um I gilded the paperback um a related book is this book that I made for the new museum um the exhibition nari award we the people opened in February 2019 um and I made the catalog for it um this is an exhibition view inside the new museum and um what's important to notice is this artwork on the left this copper plate work so nari's punctured geometric patterns in the panel reference congolese cosmograms an ancient prayer symbol that represents the cycle of birth and death and etc and um he encountered the symbol in a visit to um an african baptist church in savannah georgia which was part of the underground railroad so holes of similar patterns are cut into plates and floorboards and they allowed people to breathe when people were um kind of stopping there and hiding on the course of the along the course of the underground railroad so to me I thought like this work is um super important to preserve and super important to remember and I think one thing about art catalogs is people sort of buy them put them on coffee tables and they just sit there forever um so my intention with this book is to make the artwork and to make the copper plate and to to edge it all around through that two color printing um so that even if it was in a stack of books from all four angles it would sort of still be a reminder of this artwork um so this is a stack of them um so it's interesting I'm glad uh Ben brought up the reference of like the Gutenberg Bible and these like tall narrow columns and I think um I thought about the spiritual aspect of Nari's work a lot and about that church and so the interior typography is it has a contrast between being really crude and also being kind of spiritual so it takes the long thin columns the justified columns from spiritual texts but the font again is like aerial narrow bold or something you can just see on a sign anywhere it's not you know it's again kind of just something available for everyone to to use and um the size of the captions throughout the book are the same exact size of the curatorial essay text and for me that was really important because I think that the artwork and the materials of the artwork and the intentions behind the artwork are as equal as um a critic or a scholar or a curator's opinion about that artwork and so for me that was a very subtle way to put them on the same plane here's the glamour shot um and so I also do uh I also designed this book with James Graham and Isabelle Kirkham of it with the Office of Publications here and this came out recently it's John May's book Signal Image Architecture so one idea in this book is that architecture is already an image and an image is sort of never ending like always beginning always ending like always in flux because um read the book maybe um so one so one thing about this book is we we chose a material like a clear iridescence because it's sort of like not really a color it's it's like all colors no colors it can be it can be a color so it can be you know blue it can also be dark blue it can also be red yellow orange or as it's sitting on the table here I don't see any color at all so it sort of has this um material aspect of being always in between something the book discusses the first the creator of television John Logie Baird and um this is like that tiny book this flap image of that of um that man who created television is full scale so it's interesting to to see it and and to know that it is full scale because you realize like how big the first television image was was like really really tiny um we also did it we did so the iridescent foil and then we also embossed it so it kind of is raised and kind of has a texture again this is a full scale portrait of John Logie Baird and this is the interior and you see this image is kind of going into the gutter so um this is sort of hard to explain but um when you print commercially you're not you're printing page by page but the pages are arranged in a block like this so it's like a press sheet and then it gets cut and folded into like a signature if that's in that thing so uh we were thinking about what is an image in terms of book printing and we decided that okay an image is a press sheet so we designed the images in this book based on the press sheet not based on the page um so here's a diagram of how images are placed on the press sheet and kind of going over pages right um so then in the book you see artifacts of that by a page uh image going off one page and then coming back on the other page because in the construction of the book those were printed next to each other and then cut and separated um here's another example of that and another example um and this is also another example of um kind of a nod to another designer um so Ben showed the book speaker receiver and in that book it's about speaking and receiving right and so this book is also about signaling so in speaker receiver Julia Bourne every time she ends a chapter the next one begins at the same horizontal location so as a nod to that every time the chapter ends the next one begins in the same location so this one ended three lines from the bottom and so this one starts three lines three lines from the bottom um and in the back is the only place you see the images in their entirety but they're very small very small index yeah and that's the book