 I don't know, I did one keynote like one time in my life, and I was like, never again. It's too hard. I probably should. It's pretty useful. Although... I'm uncomfortable. Okay, good. That's it. No, I was kind of just a little weird. I'll be less visually. I should stop talking in the morning. Okay. Well, you're always so stylish. You don't need security. Thank you. Hey, Skyler. Is it possible to lower the lights in the back, or over here? That's fine. It doesn't have to be that stupid. Oh, yeah. Is this okay? This is fine. Okay. Hi everyone. I think most of us are here now. Welcome to Graphics Project 2020. Today we have three guest speakers that are going to talk about the book, and the book from three slightly different perspectives, and I think you'll find it very useful as you start to think about your portfolios most immediately, but you'll continue to work on books. You'll continue to think about a way of communicating ideas visually beyond GSAP. So I think you'll learn many lessons and pick up tips from the three lectures. So let me introduce you to our first speaker. His name is Ben Furman-Lee. Ben Furman-Lee is a graphic designer developing work with individuals and institutions in cultural and public domains, primarily in the field of art and architecture. Together with Neil Donnelly, he's collaborated closely with The Met, Cooper Hewitt, Guggenheim Museum, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Harvard GSD, and others. He's designed custom alphabets for clients like Fondaciano Prada and Office Alexis Mark. He's also taught at, or he maybe is teaching at Parsons, and has been a critic at Pratt, Rockers, Yale, and here at Columbia. He holds a BFA from Arts Centre College of Design and an MFA from Yale. And his talk is about the book as a collection of elements, and a book, as you all know, is a series of pages, and those pages are a collection of elements. And some of those elements are very obvious, like a text block or images, but some of those elements might not be as explicit as those. So for example, the underlying grid, which is there, but you can't see it, or the folio, or the running head, things like these. So he's going to talk about the book seen as a collection of elements and talk about those elements and how those things come together in a very cohesive way. And so I think it'll be really useful, there's going to be a lot of information conveyed here, but I think it'll be really useful for all of you, and I'm sure you'll pick up some new lexicon as we go along. Ben has a lot of experience making very thoughtful and very beautiful books in his professional career on his own and with collaborators. So let's welcome Ben. Thank you for that introduction, and thank you all for coming and for having us here. As mentioned, I'm going to be talking primarily about the book as a collection of elements, and the first half of this is going to be fairly didactic and at times even a little prescriptive, but that's to sort of set a framework with which to look at some other projects that have completed both as an independent designer and also with Neil Donnelly. And he's also given lectures here and has been a collaborator, a longtime collaborator with Columbia GSAP. Our approach, and this is not necessarily unique, but I just want to sort of look at a framework and an approach to how we look at making books and what that process sort of means for us as graphic designers. Firstly, we always begin with content, and you will begin with content, largely content that you've produced during your two or three years here at GSAP, and looking at that content in retrospect and perhaps what you want to say about it as a cohesive whole, as a body of work. And we do the same thing. The material might just be different. It might be for a collection of art at a museum, maybe a collection of essays that are being sort of edited and congealed together to form an argument. It could be a collection of mostly images. It could be a collection of mostly text. Either way, that content is always the starting point. Therein lies a lot of your answers for what you want to tease out, and from that content we develop a concept. Some sort of a graphic concept, a graphic narrative, an idea that will drive the way that that content is ultimately printed on a page and in sequence, as far as the book is concerned. So the concept then has to be linked to a form, some sort of visual form. And this is a sort of linear way of looking at this, but I've found that actually there's a more cyclical relationship, if you'd like, that once you do arrive at a certain form that expresses a concept around which organizes a certain set of content that maybe that form actually has something to say in turn about the content to begin with. And so it actually has sort of seemed more beneficial or more preferable to think about it this way. The frameworks or the elements that make up a book as a traditional medium, you know, these are all things that sometimes, as Inje said, like we take for granted, but we like to use those things, structures, organizations, sequences, as ways not to just organize content, but actually to maybe say something unique about it. Armand Meves, who is one member of a duo, Meves and Venderson in Amsterdam, Graphic Design Studio, sums up a lot of what I'm going to talk about today as far as a collection of elements nicely in a small book, a small essay in a book called The Form of the Book Book. And he acknowledges the sort of obvious limitations, many of which all three of us are going to talk about this afternoon, but acknowledging those limitations and the sort of tried and true things that make up your standard book are actually, you know, options and places for a lot of creativity. In the end, if you were able to link the content to your concept and the concept to a form, you have succeeded. And to find this form, you're restricted on many fronts. There were technical restrictions. Most books, of course, are printed on paper with few exceptions. The printing is offset lithography or a color laser print, black and white. These are always sort of assumptions that you go into as far as how this thing will be produced in the end. Dimensions of the book are often premeditated by the limitations of the press and the size of the paper that can be run through. There's always sort of elements to consider as far as the gutter, the edges of the spread. There's a number of ways that you can bind with spirals, saddle stitch with staples, you can sew it with thread. All of these things contribute to what makes a book a book, but really in the end they all look like books. And that's not a bad thing. This is a tried and tested media that we've known in its sort of current form really for about 500 years. The books don't really look all that different than they did in the mid and late 1400s. And that means as a sort of tested medium that the formal elements of a book, they remain practical and they remain fundamental parts of its construction. That said, all of those elements are subject to choices that you as designers, you as the maker of your portfolio books, we as graphic designers all have in our hands. So as I said, this sort of lens through which to see a book as a collection of elements, this first half is going to be sort of didactic and prescriptive. We're going to look through four significant elements and how they contribute to sort of the sum of a book's whole. And that's typography, the grid, images, and then a bit more of an in-depth look at the apparatus as a sort of like index of all of the elements that sort of make up a book as far as page numbers, covers, spines, these kinds of things. So first is typography which is of course the carrier of visual language that's printed on a page. And I want to talk about just sort of three overarching sort of groupings and one is sort of distinguishing between type classifications, which again sometimes we all take for granted. We open our phones, we look at a news article, type is sent to our phones and our laptops at great speed, we don't really think about what we're looking at. But these forms, serif, sans serif, contemporary, old style, they all have a particular aesthetic underpinning whether we are conscious of it or not. My hope is that today you'll see a little bit more of that as you are sort of consuming information at a very rapid rate. Then kind of an important distinction between what is considered and what we call a text font and a display font and those sort of their two respective roles that they play in books. And then also just some type setting basics, like really basic formal techniques for looking at a text block or a bit of communication. It's really important to keep in mind that the development of typographic form, what letter forms look like, has really been linked almost entirely to developments in technology, the way that type is produced, the way it is used, printed, distributed, and now obviously broadcast on web or mobile devices. So in the history of looking at type, the first movable type that was mass produced and cut from metal was still designed to look like and emulate the human hand. It had a very humanistic quality. In fact, most typefaces that were first cast in metal actually came with several different versions of a lower case letter A, for example, or various modifications to a lower case letter D. All that to say is that when this gets set up and actually inked and printed, that no letter form looked completely machine made, if you will, because you saw sort of some of these irregularities. And of course the metal castings weren't perfect either. So there was sort of this trace of the human hand that was still present in mechanical mass produced printing. Fast forwarding, and I should say this is a very broad and very brief sort of like separation of these two classifications. But in terms of what we look at in modern type, things are now of course produced with Bezier curves and are digitally produced to like near precision. And these methods of manufacturing, mass production, elimination of ornament all came sort of with the turn of the century and sort of demonstrates an evolution. Here's a great illustration of that. On the left you see a printing of an old style Roman type by Francesco Griffo in 1496. This was printed by Aldous Manusius and a moment in time when the large format of books that Gutenberg were printing were certainly reduced a little bit and became a little bit more familiar, a little bit more easy to handle as an object. But this on the left you see is sort of the archetype of something that we'll see later. It's a typeface that's still currently in use in a digital form. 500 years later, it's kind of miraculous. On the right is a printing of Grotesque 215 from 1926. And as you can tell, there's a sort of, there's a brutal difference between the two. One is, one has serifs, which are the small horizontal strokes at the ends of the letter form terminals. And then on the right you see sort of an elimination of any of that. It's a much more structural, sturdy, almost a monoline. Meaning it sort of feels like it's all the same stroke width. And so this is like a really, again, broad, reductive kind of look at this. But it does have a very different tone of voice if you look at them side by side. I was also asked to sort of in a really prescriptive way look at a handful of like 8 to 10 typefaces that have really stood up and stood the test of time. And that we would actually offer is sort of like almost a recommendation to you who are designing your portfolios and beginning to think about what a typographic voice might look like. On the left you see just again a broad classification of serifs. And on the right a fairly wide variety of sans serifs. These again have stood the test of time there. Some on the left, which were originally cast in metal, even some on the right as well. These have all been now digitized and are now available as software. And it's again remarkable. Monotype Bembo is the sort of, it is the extension of what we just looked at from Francesco Griffo in 1496. And Bembo is still used today on everything from Peter Savile's record covers for Joy Division in the 80s to refined art catalogs. Futura on the other hand, for example, is probably the most popular long-standing geometric sans serif that was developed in the early 1900s, but is like still used as like a corporate typeface for Nike, for Supreme. I mean this is obviously still part of the cultural sort of visual aesthetic. Others here are a bit more nuanced, but Accidents Grotesque too has been around for 100 years as well and yet is still used in architectural publications of all kinds. So this is a pretty good list. Highly curated of course on my part because I made these selections. So you can disregard them if you want entirely. But hopefully they might serve as a good sort of like just groundwork from which you can take. There's also implications about like how type is handled. It's not just what the letter forms themselves look like, but it's also the sort of structure on the page. On the left you see another one of Aldous Manusius's print. This is another Roman that was cast by Francesco Griffo. It's set with really generous margins on the left and bottom part of the page. It sort of respects the golden section. It is like considered a masterpiece of Renaissance printing. On the right, 500 years later, this is a page from a monograph for an artist who does video and installation and sculptural work. The book is called Sources in the Air. It was designed by Mavison Venderson. It's set in Univer, which we just saw in the previous slide. It has very tight margins at the top and bottom using a very like economic sort of use of the page. It just fills all the way. It's set sort of right in the middle. You'll notice that on the left it's what's called full justified, which is the text is filling an entire sort of structural box. There's no irregularity. On the right hand side you see that the type is flush left with a rag right, meaning that the text is unjustified. It doesn't meet that perfect rectangular text block. The text just flows until it hits the end of the line and it goes to the next. So these are two very different obviously styles and maybe represent two different very divergent ideologies too. So to move on from that sort of again broad classification, I want to talk a little bit about the difference between a text and a display font. This is an important thing because you are obviously going to be working with all elements of your portfolio from small captions at a very much smaller scale to maybe what might happen on the cover, which might be a larger and a more expressive scale. So what we call a text face is really intended for use at smaller scales for longer discursive texts, often a longer line length, maybe for the body of a block of content. On the other hand display type might be used for larger scales. They are much more strong in impact and maybe visual weight and again a good example would be like a headline or a poster. You see the GSAP lecture poster series often have a lot of expressive display typography. Again to make for an immediate impact to draw a viewer in from a distance perhaps to say something expressive about what's going on. It's good to think about it in terms of just sort of how they work and the roles that they play. Text type is much more sort of functional you might say whereas display type is more expressive. Text type needs to be very legible and easy to sort of read and digest and move quickly through a text. Display type might be a little more disruptive, might make you think it might connect much more in a formal sense to something that's happening in the poster. I also like to think about it in terms of a distance. Text type is more like a marathon, display type is much more like a sprint. The attention span that it sort of takes one is over a longer period of time to read and consume a text. The other again like I said is like for an instant sort of millisecond of an impact. Or if you like, I like to think of type as furniture in a room sometimes, graphic design often or arranging elements on a page as sort of arranging furniture in a room. This is sort of the best way I can describe this, a folding chair as text or a shell chair. One is meant for a large audience, the other is maybe to make a statement sort of in a room. To look just comparatively at like what I really mean, I just set a few things in a text face on the left and a display face on the right. In this case we have Times New Roman, one of the most tried and true serifs of the last 100 years. And on the right we have something from the late 60s called syntax. Again, you don't want to read syntax, you know, you don't want to digest your news for example in syntax. But you might want to express something much more radical with syntax. On the left we have Accidents Grotesque, on the right we have Mistral, which is a like totally bizarre sort of imitating handwriting brush script. Again, you would not want to read a long artist's essay about theoretical architecture set in Mistral. Baskerville is a great British transitional type. Again, you notice sort of the weight, it feels quite even in texture, balanced. On the right you have Antique Olive, which is designed by French type designer Roger Escavon. It's got a lot more expression, strange weight distribution between top and bottom. It's quite wide and extended sort of, like in terms of its proportion. Again, it's probably going to be much more pleasant to read a longer text in Baskerville than it would be in Antique Olive Large. So now to talk a little bit about nuts and bolts of typesetting itself. This is just sort of a brief run-through of some comparative text blocks. When you're setting type in a computer, it has certain algorithms and scripts that are running to format the text. It doesn't mean that it's always right. In fact, most of the time it means that it's not right. And there are things that you can do as a designer working with this software to change, to modify, to adjust the way that text is set. So on the left you see something that's default justified, meaning it's just exactly the way that the computer flowed in the text. On the right is something that I've manipulated and changed in terms of the spacing, the tracking, the word spacing. And you'll notice too that the left, maybe the text block is a bit narrow. You can see some irregular negative spaces. We call these rivers that sort of flow through the breaks in the text, right? It's a little unpleasant. Here we have sort of a much nicer, cleaner texture overall. And in type we talk a lot about the color of type, meaning the sort of like the density or the value, sort of hue of the type, if you will. So that you see sort of an even color on the right where on the left you sort of see some like static in a way. There are some like strange things happening. In this case on the left the letting is way too loose, right? What happens is that the text block begins to break down and it begins to look just like lines rather than a cohesive block. And what you want is sort of something that feels evenly balanced between both the line length and also the distance between lines of text. Again I apologize for the like extreme nerdiness of this, but these are practical sort of comparisons to just help you in how you sort of begin to think about your own type setting. Here the letting is far too tight and the letting is also a term that we use to describe the distance between lines of type. This also is leftover terminology from when type was actually set in metal and strips of lead were used to set in between the actual lines of type. So letting, even though it doesn't exist anymore when we're type setting digitally, it's just a term that has been sort of passed on. But you can also say line height and it means the same thing. So here on the left the line height is far too dense. You can see characters are actually colliding with each other which you don't want. It creates dark sort of spots almost in the text and is really hard to read, right? Here the tracking is too tight. The tracking is the distance between letter forms themselves and now the text feels like it's maybe okay in terms of the line height, but because the tracking is so tight letters again are sort of running into each other. And what begins to happen is that again the line becomes a little bit too legible as just a strip, as a sort of like graphic strip rather than again just sort of a nice balanced texture. Here the tracking is far too loose, right? The words themselves actually start to break down. You sort of start to lose where a word ends and where another word begins. This can disrupt someone's reading pattern and slow it down which you really don't want. Additionally now moving into left justified or unjustified text, the computer will also do certain things in a default manner that are maybe not always desirable. This is like extreme sort of nitpicking as far as type setting is concerned. So you don't have to be worried about this. However I do want to point it out that there is a difference in that you can control it. So here if you look at the way that the text ends on the right side of the text block, in one case in a graphic reduction you see the sort of irregularity and what you don't want are sort of undesirable shapes to start happening, sort of undue like waves. On the right hand side you see something that's been modified a little bit and changed to be sort of an alternating sort of rag that feels a little more balanced. Again here's the sort of default rag, the typeset rag on the right and a graphic sort of reduction of that. Okay moving on to a little bit zooming out from type, looking at a grid. Grids are and to begin at a really large scale in the macro sense and then we're going to move into smaller scale. Grids orchestrate a great deal of our lives whether we're conscious of it or not. They are ways of organizing spaces, places, even text on a page, images on a page. And this is a reductive sort of line illustration of Manhattan and you can see like really directly where the original city as a Dutch settlement began is like a bit more of a hodgepodge down below in the southern tip and then all of a sudden you see an immediate north-south perfect grid, 90 degree axis that came thereafter. It's true that you can actually go to Central Park and find metal stakes in the ground where the original planned cross sections of avenues and streets were going to be going. Central Park was sort of not part of the original city plan but as you probably all know but these stakes are still kind of in the ground throughout some of the rolling hills of Central Park. Moving a little bit smaller scale into a space, into a physical space. This is sort of like the modernist dream, right? This is from Joseph Mueller Brockman's book called Grid Systems and this is a sort of illustration of a grid and a three-dimensional space organizing everything from, this is like an exhibition space of course, but organizing everything from the texts to images or parts of the installation to armatures themselves, even the ceiling lights. It's a bit maniacal but illustrative still of how grids as an underlying system, sort of like skeleton, can actually organize everything from a large scale city to a room. To something that might be a little more illustrative, this is an installation, just a pop-up installation as part of the 27th Bernaud Biennial of Graphic Design and it was a display of all of the known book covers of a particular designer for a publisher and this represents a collection and part of the work of Edwin Vasquez and Wayne Daly who are British designers but they had this collection and here it is perfectly gridded and the negative spaces that you see are all the absent book covers from this collection. So it becomes actually in this case a sort of way of communicating some information. This tightly gridded system demonstrates something about this collection of book covers. And then moving down into the page, back in terms of our book, again on the left this is a page from Gutenberg's Bible in 1455 and on the right from 1980 a poster for just Miller Brockman's poster design that is an eschewed grid but it still is present and I'm not sure if you can see the faint white lines there but what appears to be a very fluid and dynamic poster is actually really, really hyperstructural underneath. A grid can serve, this is a page or a few pages out of Yale's constructs which is sort of like a broadsheet designed by Hyokwon and you can see here much like any broadsheet or newsprint a really rigid four column grid that organizes both text and image really well. You can see on the right hand page the rule above the top, right above the title there's a break in the first column because that's signifying actually that that's some continuing information from a previous sheet and that the new rule that begins above academic initiatives and events is the beginning of a new set of content. Some very modest rules break up parts of these but otherwise it looks like a pretty cohesive and structured four column grid. And down even to the letter form themselves, type is much like music in terms of notes and the space between notes. This is obviously a sort of, this is an old style of type that we don't really use too much anymore but you don't see too much anymore but this demonstrates perfectly the rhythm between the vertical strokes of these characters and the space between them. And really this is foundational to even the way that the Latin alphabet looks today. Here's a few brief diagrams from a type designer named Gerrit Neuerge and he wrote a book that talks about his own type design methods and writing methods and this demonstrates very clearly something that begins to resemble much more like what we're accustomed to in terms of the Latin alphabet but still illustrating the important rhythm and cadence between strokes and spaces between the strokes. Here you see examples of bad spacing based on the like width of the strokes. Figure one is way too tight, figure two and figure one are too tight, figure three and figure four are way too loose. Here they are sort of balanced, a nice rhythm and structure between the proportion of the letter form and how it looks but this is a grid essentially. Or if you like to think about it, a grid is really a skeleton around which content is built. It is invisible to most but it gives structure, gives a sort of underlying logic that can help organize and also create a diversity of sort of expressions. This whole presentation is in fact existing on a grid itself and that's to just help the organization of all the content there. This is an extract from a book called Designing Books, Theory and Practice and this is a nice illustration of a three by six modular grid. You can see on the right the page from where this is extracted and my illustration on the left of this exact thing. You can see faintly the red lines that sort of dictate where columns of text, where different sizes of images can be placed and the size of the gutters or the spaces between those things are sort of governing their placement on the page. So setting up a really good grid to begin any project is extremely helpful. It's going to save you a lot of headaches and a lot of arbitrary decisions that you might make otherwise. This helps provide like I said a sort of logical framework of structure around which to sort of organize all your content. Moving on just briefly because there's going to be more discussions about images and printing and whatnot but I do want to talk about the image it's still an element of the book and in a really simple sense I want to talk about sort of the difference between various ways of printing or reproducing images. On the left of course you have a full color image. This is intended to be a sort of like one to one reproduction trying to capture everything that there is about the original. Of course it's being reproduced anyways we acknowledge that this is not the original monolith so this is just a digital image of it but if being printed a full color image is trying to be as true to the original as possible. When it's in grayscale it sort of seems like there's one step of translations which one step removed it becomes maybe a bit more archival. It removes some of the information that might be important and just maybe reduces it a little bit to form or value. Again it's just one step of translation that maybe changes its feeling it maybe feels less true you're allowed to sort of look at it with a bit of a more distance rather than something that's trying to be a true reproduction. You can take that one step further and actually produce that grayscale image in just one ink color called monochrome or two you could have a duotone image but this becomes something really different this is like a third degree of translation maybe a second or third degree of translation feels a little bit more like a war haul print in some ways where it becomes something that's really not interested in reproducing the thing as true to its original but might actually be saying something about it might be commenting on the nature of this reproduction. A half tone is another way of producing images particularly you'd see in like a web offset printing like newspapers are really coarse images this might actually sort of intentionally reduce the value of the image it feels a little bit watered down a little bit reductive and maybe in some cases it feels a little more familiarized or a little more pop depending on your sort of frame of reference but it is important to be considerate of what you might be trying to say with your images if you're producing a really beautiful photograph of a model that you've made you probably want that to be in full color because it's going to be a truest representation of the model itself that you want to reproduce in the book something like sketches for example that maybe come from very different sources you might have been using different pens at the time to make those drawings they might be drawn in different types of paper and so you might want to try and reduce all of those differences to just look at the like formal qualities of the sketch for example and reproducing those as grayscale might be a way to sort of unify a collection of sketches in that sense and it's not so important to be true to the original itself so those are kind of ways that you can think about images and how you produce again there's going to be a lot more said about this in detail following me finally to look at a sort of lexicon of the things that make up the sort of like frameworks of books and the things that we sort of often take for granted like every book has page numbers they're always numerical most of the time they're providing a sort of sequence you always have a cover you always have a spine you always have a back cover you always have a table of contents these are elements that just sort of like we take for granted and assume we're going to be there in part of a book but what you do with them how you choose to use them might actually say something might actually have a profound effect about how a reader enters the space of your book or your narrative so to look at covers to begin with I've created sort of just an overview or sort of catalog again highly curated but of covers and page numbers and spines things to just look at and dissect sort of as a group almost a collection of a collection of elements if you will and I'm going to start with covers and sort of breaking this down just into like their approach so this is type only doing just typography on the cover to sort of draw a reader in to make a statement maybe it's an extraction of what's happening on the inside but this is using only typography as the primary visual element I often prefer strictly typographic covers and it's largely because what you do with it and how you manipulate the type often leave the most room for interpretation it remains the most ambiguous in a way to a viewer if you begin with an image it's hard to enter the space of that book without any other idea except for the very specific image that you've seen also how do you sum up the entire contents of a book collection of images in some cases with just one image how does that one representative image capture the whole thing it's very hard with typography you have a bit more freedom and you can leave a bit more room for interpretation or imagination on the part of the reader here are two covers that also consider both the front and the back and we'll talk more about the one on the right but the one on the left is from an artist's monograph called Speaker Receiver and Speaker is printed on the front Receiver on the back the whole title is not visible but it becomes more of a dialogue it acknowledges the volume of the book itself as both having a back and front cover it invites the reader to maybe turn from both sides similar with architectures all over the blurb and the contributing authors on the back is printed in reverse on the front cover even the barcode is printed in reverse on the front cover in white the title is printed in black and reading correctly on the front cover and then printed in reverse and white on the back cover again that's to acknowledge the sort of both sides of the front and back cover on the flip side image only sort of creates a very atmospheric much more sort of in some ways mysterious way there's no title it's a bit of a bold gesture and it creates something of mystery and intrigue as to what might be inside it's also going to invite some imagination on the part of the reader rituals and walls on the left actually comes packaged with sort of a clear wrap and there's a silk screen print on that that when you un-package the book it gets thrown away but in reality the cover is just this just this wall itself for a monograph of Giuseppe Panona the inner life of forms this sort of beautiful full wrap image of the box set of these sculptures wraps the whole thing one of these trees goes up the spine it's quite nice here on the far right is a program for a playhouse in Zurich and this is a composite image of all of the actors from that season layered on top of one another it's a pretty evocative image simultaneously type and image working together and how those two might play off one another be layered over one another say something about one another there is a relationship where the title or the text meets the image and might in fact between those two things generate a third meaning in some cases there are other cases too where a cover is not treated exactly or traditionally as a cover John Byrd or Ways of Seeing was a phenomenal example of that designed by Richard Hollis the text begins immediately on the front cover even one of the first figures that's illustrating this text begins on the front cover there's a sense of immediacy same with the Yale MFA photography book designed by Neil Donnelly the essay the sort of supportive essay for this small exhibition catalog begins right away so there's an immediacy there's a sort of like no frills just sort of immersion into what's going to happen there's no formality of a cover and a title page a table of contents it just begins right away and there's something quite nice about that I am a camera in the Saatchi Gallery 2000 this is a different case altogether where the cover actually sort of exists halfway between the book and it's a large it's a sort of a tome so it's an impressive object too but this is just a plate and a caption that begins on the front cover so it's a sort of disarming thing in repositioning or reimagining where that cover exists you could think about layers, layering information Dada Globe Reconstructed has the title of the book type set and designed by the designers printed beneath a reproduction of a letter written by Tristan Zara kind of giving a sort of mandate about what this exhibition might be and it went unrealized for 100 years but that letter is printed in full beneath for a platform that's a sort of like a composite of several different kinds of covers that are happening on the inside and everything all at once a small collection of mosses work designed by Neil Donnelly actually reproduces the entire contents of the book on the cover all sort of compressed in one moment so layers are an interesting opportunity to think about things and how you might bring what's inside of the book to the outside exposed content might do something similar for example on the far right the 100th issue of OAS magazine or journal which is when it celebrated its 100th issue it did a special on the current designer Carl Martins who's been responsible for its design and output for last couple of decades creates a full index of the entire history in reverse chronological order beginning with 100 and going back to its origins of like all of the print details about each of those issues and who was designing it and a pretty nice gesture continues on into the inside as well okay, table of contents sort of elements that again we all take for granted because we just assume they ought to be there and they ought to be in the beginning they provide a way finding provide a fundamental sort of functional use and that is important but it also might be an opportunity to play the way that you direct a reader into the text might be in an unconventional way you can look at scale changes sometimes oversized type a little more irreverence might allow for some more legible gestures an example on the far right there are actually multiple paginations for each of the artists who are being featured in this catalog and they happen in two places so both on page 3 and on page 127 it's a bit strange we usually are accustomed to seeing just one page number and four a piece of content that we're looking for a table of contents can be seen as a number of other things instead of titles of essays or sections an example on the left it's just marked by quotations that are framing each of those sections this example in the middle comes from a book called tools and architecture it actually reproduces the table of contents is a spread that reproduces the entirety of the book as a book map in small thumbnail icons with the page numbers beneath them so the table of contents becomes an entirely visual thing on the far right a book that was just produced by or published by Columbia books on architecture in the city called ways of knowing city this is an example of a table of contents that is used as a map and these pieces are reproduced in a full scale on the title pages of those essays this one on the left should look very familiar to you it's the table of contents from abstract and in a way abstract of course has sort of several covers all at once depending on where you want to enter in this case they work kind enough and generous enough to provide a sort of marker about where you are so it really is providing a sense of way finding with just that black box the same exact table of contents is reproduced on all five sections or four sections as you move through the pagination might change completely and in this case the table of contents is actually just the page numbers are replaced with the initials of the artists being featured or if you like and you sort of enjoy the structure of a classical table of contents then that option obviously seems in a really contemporary context seems actually kind of alarming and maybe different because it is sort of returning something more tried and true Spines themselves are also an opportunity for ways in which ideas inside of your book might find their way on the exterior in one case on the far left series of thumbnail images are replacing what would traditionally be text the text might go be run from top to bottom rather than rotated on its side as in perspective 45 what does it mean when you have a spiral binding and there really there is no spine there is no graphic surface with which to play in the example before history these are two books that are part of and they are two different sizes as well that are part of the same sort of publication and the type is split across the spine of both of those but therefore sort of coheres it as a whole on the shelf what does it mean when your spine has nothing on it it is completely blank when you have a really wide spine and it becomes an opportunity for some graphic play in this case this is actually just a book of paper samples but the punctuation and the period between GF the initials GF has been brought up from the letter I in Smith and sort of occupies that same space Spines can be also sort of imbued with narrative value this is a 8 volume or 7 volume series of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire sort of a beautiful illustration that says something that uses that space and acknowledges where this will sit as a like set right on a shelf and again is imbued with narrative value that wouldn't really be achievable in any other case then on its spine and here on a shelf folios or page numbers again this seems really sort of like reductive and sort of as something that we take for granted but there are opportunities and there are things that how you treat these might affect how a reader actually sort of perceives the page if a page number is oversized it really puts a lot of attention on where a reader is perhaps your book is extremely thick and you want to make sure that a reader knows exactly where they are all the time an oversized page number will help do that page number might be more modest set in the corner page numbers might be rotated on a 90 degree axis made very small in this way they sort of get out of the way they sort of remove themselves from being too intrusive on the content what happens if you need to use a graphic element to maybe demarcate this type of page from another type of page if the type is rotated in bold and in this case it's paired with an ongoing series of titles if a page number is also more modest and just sort of does the role that it needs to play could be printed in color could be included with a time stamp so that a page number becomes something a little bit more than just a place in a book but also as a place in time in this case on the far right these are again the artist initials are marking the space that you are there are no page numbers in this case the initials are just used and it sort of is the only sense of way finding that you get really then puts the focal point on the featured artist or on the featured subject rather than where you are in a particular narrative similarly if you use the alphabet instead of a numerical ordering system that changes how someone might perceive how you're displaying and framing the contents if you might want to sandwich the page numbers in the gutter that really removes them makes it very hard actually to figure out where you are in a way it's maybe a bit too sort of I don't know, ungenerous to a reader to do that when they just want to find their way to something but you might have very good reason for doing that and it often has a bit more of a sense of playfulness bold and oversized again will do something totally different to call your attention they also provide a really lower margin of a page they provide a really stark sort of frame or corner of a frame for the page all taken together they're just sort of again there, we take them for granted but it's something worth considering with how you want to actually order and provide way finding for your reader so looking at this sort of lexicon and all of the elements that just sort of laid out I want to go through just three examples of some of my own work and how these things sort of play out and cohere a particular book as a collection of elements so first I'm going to begin with Space Pack which is the extension of practicing architect and and professor up at MIT was working for some time at Princeton on his dissertation about the work the life of Alfred Neumann who was sort of an unsung modernist from the mid-century and this is an extension of his PhD work it began with an exhibition that traveled throughout Europe and I was working with him on the design of exhibition elements and I just want to show this because these are full-scale reproductions of models but full-scale reproductions of units that this architect sort of created from his own proportional system and using a lot of pretty bold color in occasions and these were part of the exhibition to sort of really give a sense of his life's theory work practice and output I'll come back to that to begin with typography you might have a lot of decisions to make as far as why you want to choose type and it may be for period reasons it may be for sort of geographic reasons there also may be narrative reasons in my case I chose something that had a specific narrative reason and Mercator is a typeface that is to this day unpublished undigitized but was produced by a Dutch designer published in 1958 although work began on it sooner and it was sort of modeled on earlier grotesque of the early 1900s but it sort of fell out of existence for whatever economic commercial or sort of technological reasons that really never was sort of popularized it was sort of considered a Dutch response to Helvetica which of course had massive commercial access this time but there was something nice about it and a little bit crude about its details and the way it was made that still that quite resonated with me and in addition to that it was similar to and it sort of had a parallel with Neumann's architectural work which went sort of unpublished undiscussed and fell out of sort of like consciousness for a while until now and so I was working to to draw this and trace this and bring this back into sort of existence so I created a digital version of this based on some metal specimens that had been printed and there was also a nice pairing that like at the height of Neumann's work in the late 50s early 60s was when this typeface was published so there was both a sort of period and a narrative value that I found in it so the whole book is set in this type and Rafi found a nice sort of texture to it and liked seeing how the text was set in it and I had my reasons so it found its way in there are two discrete halves of this book one is the sort of four chapters of critical text on the the life the theory, the development, the architecture and the cultural and historical sort of conditions around which a lot of Neumann's work was built and the grid is itself the same throughout but allows a lot of flexibility with different kinds of content it was based on a sort of scalar modular grid that was true to Neumann's theories of proportion and it allowed for some changes between like I said some of the theoretical text up front and the project text that came later on the second half is a sort of full catalog of all 26 known built and unbuilt projects of Alfred Neumann and the problem that I sort of encountered with this was the nature of the material coming to us was in large part scattered it was everything from scans of old projection slides to photo copies to original photos to like a family collection from Neumann's surviving granddaughter it was a real hodgepodge of material and to sort of cohere all of this stuff into some you know ordered logical narrative sense really needed some work and I was fortunate to come across this short film that the Eames made called House After Five Years of Living which is just this sort of photo montage of their space after having been in there for five years and there was something about the way that they filmed it and it's a little bit of like details and something staged and something's quite casual and moving from the exterior to the interior that made me think about these are stills from that video that made me think about a way to cohere all of this kind of information for 26 projects and so the work that I set out to do was to first of all illustrate a process beginning with the site looking at sketches looking at models that were produced of the individual units that then created a sort of pattern that then created the structure of the building looking at the model and then if it was a built project in fact moving from there this sort of process into construction I thought about moving from like organizing all of these projects in their images from distance to proximity so you start with images that are the furthest away and then you move subsequently closer to the exterior of the space and even into the interior of the space where possible so this is a town hall in Aksiv in Israel and you move again from distance to the interior spaces and the book itself while it has a really kind of a structured grid feels a bit, it's flexible a little loose because I wanted to feel a bit like a scrapbook in a sense that you're moving through this archival material and occasionally have a full-bleed spread when it's sort of an immersive image this is Neumann in the lower left in the foyer of that town hall and barring few exceptions most of this material was black and white it was all archival material and not always great reproductions some of the drawings were redone by Rafi in his studio but to see these really beautiful structures sort of play out in a sequence was kind of important the last part was an appendix which was sort of like supplemental material about chronology of life and even sketches from the time that Neumann spent in a concentration camp to portraits of his wife to hear images of Neumann teaching in the classroom or meeting there's just sort of this sort of an appendix a bit of like an attic in a house, sort of like the back room where some of this other information is collected given that all of this stuff was black and white and thinking about those models at the beginning in the exhibition in fact which used a lot of color on these geometric surfaces the one place that I found as an opportunity to sort of inflect more of that color that make up a book which are the endpapers and the headbands so here you see just a hint of the front endpaper in blue the headband which is red and the last endpaper in yellow to just have a splash of color and an otherwise pretty heavy academic monochrome book next heavenly bodies which is a completely different kind of set of content this was a catalog that I worked on today for the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Costume Institute and their annual spring exhibition and this was heavenly bodies fashion and the Catholic imagination it was a sprawling exhibit that was very site specific that involved three different locations across the Mets Fifth Avenue and Cloister's buildings and included a range of fashion from the mid-century up until contemporary designers and all their response to Catholic iconography and Catholic narrative and sort of how those influences played into their fashion so the first thing was looking at the book structure as a whole and how it would respond to the site specific exhibition itself as I said there were three locations and three parts of this collection one were 60 pieces that were on loan from the Sistine Chapel sacristy at the Vatican that the curator Andrew Bolton managed to procure for this it included like you know vestments and sort of precious headwear and a number of other things then the second this was called fashioning worship and it really had to do with a collection of fashion that was much more sort of about pageantry pomp and circumstance if you will the Cult of Mary and this was in the Mets Fifth Avenue location in the Great Hall and sort of adjacent medieval galleries Byzantine galleries and then fashioning devotion the third was all the way up in the Mets in the north of Manhattan and this was much more focused on the sort of devotional monastic traditions and religious orders so at the outset it was going to be three volumes three sort of slim case volumes that were all distinguishing these each three pieces of the show but in fact what ended up happening is realizing that the two the last two pieces of the show were un-desirable and that the Vatican collection was sort of the thing that was offset from it that also proved beneficial because the Vatican required that all of the pieces in the show and in the catalog were bound in a separate codex completely unrelated to and trying to avoid any undesirable connections between certain pieces of fashion that might have been a little more forward wild so it was partly a restriction just based on what we were dealing with and also there was a sort of curatorial decision that made sense here so even though the second and third sections of this catalog in the show were each their own part it felt like it made sense that they were bound together so this was the sort of like the first step we also started by looking at a lot of traditions and Renaissance printing manuscripts and looking at some of the details they're pretty radical in fact the way that they laid out handled text the way that on the left hand you see like the primary text in the center with supplementary texts commentary and whatnot sort of surrounding it framing it or these strange sort of missing chunks in the two column text on the right which are actually largely sort of left over or maybe an unrealized moment where an illuminated capital letter should have been and you'll often see that in certain manuscripts where an individual initial is left but it hasn't been actually illuminated nobody sat to illustrate that character we're also really inspired by some of the source material that was inspiring the Mets sort of curation of fashion one of those things were altarpieces diptychs tryptics and these sort of perspectival nested sort of structures there's sort of an inherent structure to these that seemed appealing to us and so the other element was typography of course which seemed like a lot of opportunity for some both necessary text weight and also some more display type and we wanted to sort of cohere these three sections of the book and these three locations of the museum itself and sort of find a way to express something of like a Trinitarian idea of like one in three three in one and so I drew and developed some sketches for this initially that being something that everybody was really enthusiastic about so we finished these and it's basically the same exact skeletal structure but expressed in just sort of a regular what's called an inline where there's a stroke that's sort of dissecting the vertical strokes and then open capitals and this was all sort of you know prompted by their desire to treat the vestments and the pieces of fashion with a sort of sense of purity as they are and really just think about light and the way these things were going to be displayed would be pretty reductive in the exhibition itself so this was sort of a way of signaling kind of an opening in a way a sort of change in color and tone but also like a way that like you could imagine light coming through sort of in the backlight almost of these capital letters and the other thing that I'm enjoyable about this this is a revival of a font called Daphnis from the mid-century but in looking at this it really reminded me of Futura and in fact it's got the exact same bones of Futura except for that it has these sort of glyphic details that are reminiscent very much of like text on Roman capitals or even actually here at Columbia you can see the etching in some of the facades but Futura is on the left and this open is on the right the exact same script like Skeleton so we developed this each piece of the show would have its own treatment but it sort of feels familiar but changes transforms as you move through both the spaces of the exhibition and also the space of the catalog we also decided that there were these heavier sheets that were tipped in or sort of stuck in between the signatures of the book and the same exact die was used to make this impression on these three pages separating the three distinct sections there was a tactile difference that when you flip through the book you would hit this thicker page and you would know that you were entering something different but the text was blind debossed on all of these three sections but then only printed with metallic ink in the section that you were about to enter so it sort of was like highlighting your place as you move through the text there's a detail you can see the blind deboss just above it but this is open and entering the third section similarly we wanted to find a way to sort of structure the different kinds of contents and again looking back at the manuscripts as inspiration and some of those the sort of perspectival diptychs we decided on this sort of ascending column structure for the different kinds of content that you would encounter throughout throughout the book this is a frontispiece that also again is imbued with like some of these nested columns itself the illustrations or the figures that were accompanying the text would be placed on the interior toward the gutter we decided to just sort of use that trope of the carved out text block where an illuminated letter might have been but just use this for the small titles and authors of these contributing essays and the rest of the book was fairly patterned in the sense that we would always have a piece of fashion in full bleed on the right hand page and or the left hand page and on its opposite you would have the reference material that either the artifact or the ultra piece or the painting that directly inspired that particular designer additionally it was really important to the curator that we bring a sense of the place and the sort of subdivisions as he was curating and gathering and grouping these garments how they would be expressed and connected in the space of the book and so each of the subsections are divided and called out by a brief text about that space in the Mets galleries and so what you see on the right is a description about the medieval galleries in the great hall and about the vestments that were gathered there. These were all printed in a metallic spot just a single ink along with the text and so that you could see quite a difference between full color reproductions of both art and the fashion plates and then the subsections that sort of divided and sort of organized those. The cover was one place where we could sort of use and express all three at once. We wanted to pull out that sort of detail of the three places as distinct but really as one show so we took the title lock up and imposed the books nested grid structure on it and you see all three elements of the typeface but with a carve sort of in between the three sections. We also knew that we wanted to figure out a way to cohere this as a whole across the spine because it was the one place we knew that there was going to have to be a case for this and that we wanted some way so these are early illustrations about how this might be achievable but this is another case where we split the printing of the spine across the title but that it would still be usable as an individual volume if you had it as a whole. And lastly, again totally different sort of context as a book of collected essays edited by Esther Choi and Marika Trotter this was published a few years ago by Columbia, Books on Architecture in the City so you may have seen it around but this is again a collection of essays that are all addressing the sort of double entendre that the title suggests that architecture is both all over the place ubiquitous but also in a sort of constant existential state of its eminent demise and there was a sort of notion when talking with the editors and reading through the texts that there was no nobody was taking necessarily a direct position in one way or the other but that they were acknowledging both sort of simultaneously and so one of the things that the editors said she described it as a Janus faced gambit or a Janus themed gambit this is a Janus coin sort of, you know, the dual faced God sort of ending the beginning backwards and forwards and this provided a pretty substantial motif and idea that sort of drove the rest of the design throughout the process that things would actually again after reading and understanding the whole editorial desire that things were actually never quite backwards nor forwards that it was both trying to cast something into the future while also looking in the past and understanding a historical context so in some of the display type we flip the counters so that text is sort of neither backwards nor forwards we also wanted to figure out a way to push an idea through both type and image and this is something that James Graham who, you know, through his incisive sort of leadership here as editor at the beginning we knew this was going to be a dual or a two color print it was sort of a limitation that was placed on us up front but without that limitation at the beginning I don't think we would have arrived where we did again this was one of the first things that I worked on when designing with Neil and we thought about a way to print both in just in black and in a fluorescent spot color and that we might see both an image in the right reading way that it's meant to be and also perhaps in its sort of reverse and in a spot color that sort of therefore feels a little bit more secondary it started with largely with the title pages of the essays that you would see it in reverse always first and in the Pantone spot color this fluorescent spot and then turn the page and see it in its sort of right reading form this idea extended into the images and, you know, thankfully both the editors and Columbia GSAP were extremely supportive of some of our more radical ideas and this is a case where that sort of collaboration really made this book what it was so here you see a figure before you actually see it in appearing in the text you see it in reverse as a spot color and it sort of is a layer that sort of recedes behind the primary text similarly here a line drawing that then appears behind another figure a piece of what is to come and of course you can imagine this grid structure is really important to keep things organized and cohered the the other benefit of this two color print was that for a number of the design contributions that had highlighted elements we could use that spot color as a way to highlight elements that they were either in urban planning illustrations drawings whatever it might be it became a really good secondary highlight color that same grid that is present underneath actually is generative of four different layout types for introduction, design contributions essays and then interviews and again a grid structure while it might appear to be limiting actually generates a fluidity and a sort of way to dance around it if you will and create these sort of different content types that felt like legible changes to the reader and again we found a way to sort of extrapolate this idea from the interior beginning always with the interior we always like to design the cover last as a sort of expression or an extraction of ideas that are happening on the inside so the front cover we were able to sort of impose on the back additionally the front the title is embossed so the text is coming up from the page and on the back this white text of the title is debossed and pressing in so it's almost like the title is punching through the contents of the book and really you know was kind of a nice final expression of all the ideas that had been developed over the course of the design of the book and just to remind you again of Armand Mevis's sort of position in the end if you were able to link the content to your concept and the concept to a form then you have succeeded so thank you very much and I appreciate it