 When you put together a book it's really easy I think to become very myopic and think about the details because the details matter And they're important But I think every so often you need to zoom back you zoom out and kind of step back and look at the thing as a Cohesive holistic sort of endeavor So many will talk us through that Thank you. Many welcome Thank you, Eunja for defining what a narrator is because I think this part of the talk is the most sort of subjective and I Guess loose Angle of the discussion of designing a book. So I really think Ben and Laura for getting really deep into all the technicalities of designing I'm sorry, but I don't have a TOC for my talk And so but I have six parts in this lecture and I Will begin and end by talking about my work and in between I'll show you a lot of examples That can illustrate things you can do as a designer and editor to craft your story so according to Google I looked this up, but Historically storytelling by humans were first done Was first done over 36,000 years ago in the form of paintings Has found in Las Cua cave in southwestern part of France So that means storytelling came before humans learn to read and write And as dramatic as the sound that means also storytelling is essential to the side survival of the human race and to pass on lessons and for humans to evolve and So having a narrative is especially important also the making of creative work whether it's art architecture film fashion theater dance So when I talk about making a book as narrative medium I want to emphasize that designing a book is really about telling a story And that hopefully you can see this exercise as more than a representation of your work So I want to share this quote with you by Derek bird cell He's a British graphic designer who's known for designing a lot of books over the course of his career I found this in the introduction text of notes on book design, which I also highly recommend as a reference book for book designing He says I believe there is such a thing as a natural optimum layout for a book the design is not inflicted on the content It is derived from it The precise placement and sizing of pictures and text seems completely natural and enforced at a glance the structure of the Information on each spread is clear and unambiguous the layouts appear to have designed themselves so and later on he goes on to talk about how it's more important than ever for designers of books to Very vigilant to the content in the book because back in the day with printers There used to be someone who would read through The book before it went to print and nowadays we don't have such people doing that So designers really have control over the whole past beginning to the end and have to be really vigilant I'm going to start off by talking about this project that I worked on with wax studios a design studio based in Brooklyn, New York and it was for an Italian furniture brand called arbor. It's based in to a visa Italy and It's been around for multiple generations owned by family and they're designed a very Minimal and modernist in a way and they're very you know intelligent use of material and a really sensible use of color as well They actually designed for interest for all kinds of spaces like the home office public spaces like restaurants and schools So their whole collection of points include like chairs burnishings tables sound acoustic boards and So arbor as a brand their their ethos is The it's that essential forms can be versatile too. So essential is the key word for the brand arbor and this project was done back in 2015 2016 and Wax Studios was asked to design a Brief which is basically a short book that would tell the story of the brand in a very Clear and compelling way so that in the end when the book gets made It would be disseminated in places like you know arbor shows located in different cities around the world What design there was like the Salone the mobile and Milan Italy and other design first around the world. So so we had to work with the word essential and After and we worked with the strategist at 2 by 4 who weren't responsible for coming up with the strategic, you know, framework of the brand and But in terms of the creative storytelling You know after brainstorming with the teammates at wax You know the challenge was to come up with A visual way of talking about essential in a way that would connect to people in an emotive way So for me when I think of furniture There's been one image that really left a strong impression on my mind and it's this photo I say that Bruno Menari did back in 1944 for Thomas magazine and apparently at that time designers for furniture were Designing and inventing for invention's sake so they were not Designing furniture that would meet the needs of humans So he sort of made this provocative photo essay where he positioned himself in different uncomfortable Postures with the same chair. So it's a very strong reaction In terms of, you know, like the ease of being in furniture, so that I think so the This that image was also starting point for All of us kind of getting excited about the idea of telling the story of essential through the lens of human Ease within the world of furniture. So Basically, the idea is okay. Let's you know Bring humans into this world of furniture and tell that story in a more emotive way And so we did a whole image exploration for a while and we felt like you know We left no stone no stone unturned in this process. We looked at like fashion magazines campaigns artists books regular books fast like blogs photo blogs and We were looking for gestures of you know, sort of like every day human gesture just sitting people leaning over hands touching each other Legs folded on the couch and we try to avoid, you know, gestures that were not relatable like Aquabatic moves or like dance moves or high fashion poses. And so we really amassed hundreds of images through this research and This inspired this You know the actual art direction process for this book. So the frame it's a really short book actually but We had a clear structure for how to develop actually new content So it wasn't even about editing it was actually about creating new images for the book So luckily Arbor has at that time had a really nice collection of imagery of their own furniture shop by Shelton Evans and other photographers So our plan was to pair these images that wax studios with art director of humans engaging with each other or furniture with images of Arbor furniture And then just to show you You know a map of the six core chapters of this Arbor book These six chapters were based on the six core concepts that were very important to the brand and I'll read them out loud now So it's balance color intuitive play light and family And so under the word essential these were the six concept under which they would the brand would talk about Their values and in a way you could see these values as you know values and metaphor like metaphors for life values so that's what I find not found nice about the whole verb use of you know all of this and So the structure works with you know It shows each chapter basically starts with text openers and we worked with the writer to come up with Short paragraphs, you know talking about each of the core concepts And then we follow each text opener page with three spreads of image pairings So this is just to show you an example text opener page in this case for a sensualist balance And then we have this text on the right side in English on the right side is to Italian translation because it's The audience for the book was mostly Italian Given that Italian brand as well too And then just following up with the three spreads of image pairing So as with typical art direction projects the these images were planned You know very precisely in advance. So we knew which furniture image we would pair with the human images so The gestures that We planned ahead of the photo shoot. It was a fighter. It was a photo two-day photo shoot at the artwork showroom in New York And then we work the local like Brooklyn based photographer and the stylist Who else like a producer? It was just like a You know a nice like a typical photo shoot with always different players involved But on a much smaller scale and so anyway, so the images were really planned in advance and The gestures were inspired by some of the research that we did with all the images of human gestures So like, you know, the idea was to create nice visual compositions With these image pairings But to also clearly convey the concept that was that on discussion in that particular chapter Some of these just a more literal because essential is balance and then I'll just show you a few more Spread that I personally liked this is from with the colors essential chapter and color is Was one concept that was extremely important to the brand. So I'll show you so this was from players essential and Because color was such an important concept to our creative director at Arbor The whole notion of color was not just about oh, hey, I'll bring to comes and all these different colors They felt we're strongly about communicating notion of complexity of color as well So a color can be simple and complex at once and Then more a couple more spreads. This is also from players essential And then two more spreads from like families essential. So the summer parts, you know transcended something greater So, yeah, and then in the end we had this overview Of all these image pairings and what was nice about this was like I said before it was Just one of those rare instances as a designer where we're not just taking content from a client but all but we get to create the content ourselves and We work with the writer strategist at 2 by 4 we were photographer makeup artist stylist So it was like really comprehensive as an experience and in the end I Think we were pretty pleased in the sense that we humanized the story of a birdie to brand and then I'll show you one more Spread where in the back of the book there There was actually gatefold up an overview of all the furniture collections and then more text Translations of paragraph text in other languages like Spanish French and German Yeah, so next I'm going to talk to you about beginnings, which so this is that here I'm going to show you a lot of examples of the more practical things that you can do as a designer and This chapter is not so much about like the cover design of a book They say don't judge a book by the cover but It's more about the TOC actually and Ben did a really good job Going very deep into the design the different typology of TOC designs, but When you move past the front door, you know, I think people just appreciate really strong sense of wavefinding and Having a TOC is something that we like Ben said early retake for granted But when you see when you come across books with TOC designs that seem thoughtful or just well-designed It's evidence that the designer editor would you know a little bit more vigilant about the content abstract I'll start with this example With abstract because It's actually a book with a lot of information and a lot of different kinds of information And what I like about it is that the viral binding allows the book to be organized into different content sections by theme and To cover repeat itself So the TOC appears in the backside of the cover and then the frame around that particular section acts as a way Refinding device. So I think Ben showed this example earlier with a previous version of it's abstract and actually Eunji gave a really good talk about this project a few years ago and I Recommend watching it because it's a really good example of Again the process from content informing the form and materiality of the book and Then here you see behind the salmon pages like section D is outlined and then I am a camera. This book is a exhibition catalog for Photography exhibition at the South Sea gallery and it was designed by graphic thought facility What I like about this book is that you know, you know as an object It looks really nice and on the front cover It just got this nice image with two kids on a beach and it doesn't seem anything out of the ordinary actually when you look at the front cover design, but when you actually zoom in closer you see the above the image caption the title of the book is nestled in and Then you open the book You see another play an image caption. So you're just like, okay, this is a lot of photographs, right? But then when you get to the middle of the book, you see you come across the actual cover of the book printed on different paper stock with very special treatment to type and Following that you see the TOC and you know in the list of all the photographers grouped together by theme So when this when you come across this kind of moment in a book, you know one like you You realize oh, you shouldn't really take these things for granted But actually this was the intent of the designer to act they did these things because they wanted to amplify the reader's attention to all the other details of the book that normally people would take for granted so that was really nice and Moving on to another example project Vita. This is one of my favorite books not only for design, but actually content it's you know, Vita is another furniture brand based in Europe and This is a very comprehensive book about you know, this brand history the designers the products associated with it and What's also nice about this book? It's it's designed and edited by the same person. So Cornell Wendland is a British graphic designer and it actually shows that he edited this with the chairman of Vita Wolf-Bellbaum So then all this throughout the book in terms of like the chapter pages and this he'll see it's treated in the same Wait before I get to the part when you open the book You see an index of all the designers named the brands and products and keywords listed. So This is you know stepping back a little bit. The reason why I like this book is that it's just a lot of verbiage and big type and When you see things like this it just it gives you the impression that the editor is sort of thinking out loud and it feels more accessible approachable And so when you see a TLC on the left side So that's the main TLC with all the big sections and then when you get to the section They actually show you like a sub TLC and then when you get deep deeper into the respective chapters They have more list or that sort of act like an index of keywords that they mentioned in the chapters so I Just thought that this when I saw this book. It's just extremely transparent in a way and thoughtful and The content was also really good too. So and then another example of sort of this Transparency in the immediacy of the TLC with this older Cover design from Tate etc. Also designed by Tate Cornell Winlan I think Ben also showed examples of covers where they are just immediate and direct and show the TLC on the front cover design and You know, this means that they might be more economical with space. Who knows? But this kind of this just it just gives you the impression that they're more intellectual and about like conversation and TLC designs can be much more like it can be an opportunity for bigger typographic moments I found this book on office design at the Argosy bookstore in the upper east side And you know, it just I just really like these big, you know Chapter numbers and then the list of all, you know the content Mentioned in those chapters. So it's a bit old-school type But you know, it's got clear visual hierarchy and then this design this chapter example from Collider School Magazine designed by Okram is you can choose to you know avoid convention with TLCs and You know kind of play with words. So in this case, they have like Summary text like that look like quotes and big titer cards and then you deploy with our other information like the author name and the page number So just like Summarizing what this means for us, you know, TLC is a way to just organize the content but it once you have all of this organized depending on the typology in which you want to organize the information and Whether you have higher level groupings or typologies, this gives you it lays the groundwork for you to Maybe get inspired of what you can do conceptually once you have all this information So that's why your TLC is important and it's as you know, the reminder that we shouldn't take it for granted So it's a core part of the editing process So next though this leads us to talk about the sequence of the book and how it's important to you know Have a sense of rhythm and a good ones to you know, have their readers attention And I'll show you more examples of books that have very creative approaches to sequencing content all of you probably know this book SMX MLXL by for only designed by Bruce Ma and This book as you probably know It's over 1,300 pages raised almost seven pounds. The book is extra extra large and But and the way they sequence Their content Their projects were essays is by scale from small medium large to extra large I actually didn't know that until recently But because when you experience the book as you probably feel yourselves There's no sense of system or like even wayfinding in the book It's so massive and it's meant to get you lost in the book There's no consistency in the type treatment with these chapter openers. There are no formal chapter openers, I think but They just mix like a whole bunch of images drawings essays Travel logs everything and it really feels like an architectural odyssey and I think that's the intent to make the reader have this imaginative experience and being inspired about what was important to Rem Koolhaas in this art in articulating the His architectural practice in the context of you know, the global the explosion of the global market economy and all those You know, social political cultural factors happening at that time Another example with you know an interesting sequencing approach is perspective 35 designed by Solgi and Min perspective is the the student editor journal from Yale University and This book what's interesting is that it, you know, it just has You know two formats of paper and the main sort of formal well-polished academic essays are printed on these white sheets and then the more casual sketch like briefs are printed on these blue sheets and These blue sheets occur every 16 pages throughout the book regardless of the blow of the content So it creates a in a way consistent rhythm the design of the text on the blue sheets Just sort of change depending on what the content is So it's meant to sort of like clash against, you know, the typography on the white pages John Paulson is this book spectrum is another interesting example of a clear concept of sequencing You know as Many of you might know he's a he's known for minimalist architecture So one might not typically associate his body of work with color But he is actually I don't know if you've seen his photographs on his Instagram page But he's very skillful as a photographer and takes really beautiful photographs of textures details materials from his environment and He I think those photographs inspire his body of work as well So it made sense to you know sequence all his photos by color on a color spectrum You know very simple book design layout, but a really strong concept for this sequence of sequencing this content Yeah, so the book progresses from like yellow to reds to purple to blues and greens and Then the last example I want to show for this particular chapter is this old 1972 guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art I I I really like just like floor plans of maps and color in general So I think I'm just showing you this out of personal bias but this is a You know they when you open it they show you maps of the different floors in the museum and then they color code the rooms based on the collection and So then if you go to the second floor, they show you, you know Other rooms and they have these like nice colors associated with these different collections like music instruments pink American ring Blue far eastern artist would be green and then when you go into the book all these sections They're like discreet chapters based on collection And then the chapter pages are printed in the respective colors as they were coded on the map And then they're they actually open as gateboards So you think you get a more detailed view of that particular room in the museum And then they have all this like these icons and symbols Designated to each chapter. So this was just like a nice Color folks made and it's surprising because the cover of this book is red and You wouldn't know that they use so much color in the book unless you opened it So what does that mean for us? It means that you know with when it comes to content You can be very creative and conceptual with the way you sequence your content You could organize it by time whether it's chronology in terms of you know, like when something was made or the duration of something You can organize project by space the location Graphically or proximity in terms of this, you know, how far it is from a central location Or this is the most common way of approaching I guess is by theme which you can decide what that theme is It could be by project or program Material or any dimension in which you want to talk about your work like cultural social environmental and the status of Whether the project was built or not And I mean this is just like a loose list so you can define it however you want you can Organize your projects by scale which is what we made it with SML extra large and Yeah, and you can and anything that can be put on a scale essentially like the size or like cost and Then finally you can organize things by spectrum Like the dawn part an example with color Temperature complexity of something again anything that can be put on a spectrum in terms of degrees of intensity and So next I'll talk to you about images and text and this is the most important part of the book editing process And I'm going to start by talking about images and Now show you more The reason why I'm showing a lot more examples with images is that I think I'm you know I know that you have to deal with a lot of images yourselves with your work And I want to show you actually two books that focus a lot of image pairings and I feel like Laying out two images on a spread is for some reason really hard like harder than laying out one image versus more than three or more images and the reason is that I've come to experience this myself But and maybe you don't feel this way But when you see two images in a spread you tend to make an association with each other And I think a lot of people do so you have to be very thoughtful and careful about which two images You decide to put on a spread And I want to share this example with you. It's a book called disobedient bodies Design my okay. I'm for an exhibition that was curated by Jonathan Anderson at the Hepworth brickpeel And the exhibition is basically it's they it's about the figure the human figure In the world of art and fashion So in that exhibition there were you know sculptor works by a lot of famous artists like John art Penny Moore about the Giacometti Barbara Hepworth herself and then they were situated in those space in those spaces well so fashion designs by prominent designers like How McLean, Christian Dior, Issey Miyake, Ray Kawabuko and so That was the exhibition and but this book catalog Is designed to be an alternative interpretation of the exhibition and so it's about like a hundred forty two pages And it's not bound in a particular way. It's not stapled or you know glued together. It's just folded in half held together by a rubber band and And the pages are interweaved with photography by Jamie Hawksworth But what I love the reason why I love this book is the images are so expertly paired together to really You know accentuate your appreciation for the human figure And you know the parents might be by color or form sense of gesture movement proportion and Then you know because of the way this book is constructed and folded together you see And the interweaved pages you see images in new ways and almost kind of pause here to talk about image cropping and And I think this comes from you know Maybe some of you already know how important it is that to crop an image and how much of a difference it can make But having worked on some fashion project in the last couple years Copping and fashion and beauty is everything like little image So the next time you see a fashion campaign or picture really look at where they cut off the head of the beat And it's there's it's an intense process and so I want to show you some examples. There's the statue of David So the you know the white the left examples, you know how you normally copy like full body But the reason why copying is important is maybe you have this image where you really want to Hone the reader's attention on a specific part of the image So maybe all that other excess stuff in the image doesn't really matter So it's worth copying in so for instance if I want to just focus the reader the Viewers gaze on his upper body. I can copy You know the legs out will go farther into the torso or the detail of the face Or focus on the lower body More torso detail hand detail or the leg detail so So even when you have a bad image for instance like Copping can make all the difference photoshopping can make a difference, but cropping can also make a big difference So it's worth trying out So I want to then I want to follow up with this example called the art of color for The house of Dura and it's basically a book about the history of color and style and makeup The house of Dura and in this book is full of image pairings Just to exemplify how different pieces of art by artists Inspire the work at the house of Dura is so Again cropping plate was played a huge role in presenting these images along with the selection of the images on the right side So just showing you these again how you are likely to make these associations in this case with color Form and then this last but really nice color strips And then moving on to image layout so again Ben went really in depth with you know the different ways You can lay out text and images on a book spread But so my emphasis will be actually more images again this time So it's one thing to have one image on a spread, right? This will mean that this image is really significant or meaningful to you in the context of this book or It's just a beautiful image. So it's worth thinking about, you know The image that you choose to devote a whole spread to right versus having two images on a spread again people may might Will make those associations so which two images will you put on this bed? Is it going to be about a conceptual connection or about formal? Association and then this example on the bottom from project of Japan That one's packed with a lot of text and images So in that case like in the image captions really help the reader understand, you know the meaning behind all of these images and Then just showing you examples of spreads with three or more images The first example here is from our world sees us a pull In the sea and it's a short book but what I really liked about this is the designer co-opped and place these images in a way that would control the viewers gauge across the spread, you know from From one corner to the next And then if you have like sort of more complex, you know composition of images again Like in the project depending example all these image captains just help sort of, you know Help the the eye blow across the page Different ways of image laying out images including like layering them to create a certain like a jagged effect As shown in this example from stealing beauty Or you could be completely linear the way you lay out your images This is spread is from the office of Kirsten Gears and David van Severen They have three books like three volumes That are basically there, you know, they're a portfolio of their works, but I actually recommend these books for references for portfolio design because it's actually very well organized and Super linear and clear and they have they also have a beautiful documentation of the work but anyway in this in this spread you have three different images of the same building and You know, they have a lot of white space So that's just something to consider like how much white space will you have around your images because? white space means that you treat the images with They, you know, they seem a little bit more precious Whereas if you have the images fully like this example The whole experience feels a little bit different. It's a little bit more immersive It's feels more immediate in a way having more white space has a very different effect so I will show you this monograph from David to feel architects designed by Don Morgan and You know, this is also like sort of in terms of graphic design style. It's very quiet and modest But I want to share this example with you because there's actually a diversity of you know layout approaches in terms of The number of images he may put on a spread and this is just a spread in terms of how project is introduced So there's just like two columns of project description. It's super simple and straightforward but When you go inside the book, it's just worth noting this, you know, in a good example of the image editing process for You know showing a whole you know whole like monographs worth the body of work, right? So you can make a really nicely drawn Building drawings like full treat them, you know, give them a whole spread in the book to really give it more gravity and If you have two drawings of the same building, it's worth considering Whether they might be redundant. So in this case one is treated in color and shown, you know The first point perspective and then the other is showing an angle in black and white So they feel like different images, but they're actually the same building and it's worth noting that sense of Sort of diversity even when you're talking about the same project Model photos, you can choose just one and make it look like a really beautiful handsome picture as opposed to showing You know 20 model photos and Then you can think about visual hierarchy and here you have two big images in a smaller image alongside text and captions and Then here you have even more elements on the spread drawings historical photographs More recent photograph the project and so I thought that this was also again a different a good example of Integrating diversity and talking about the same project and oftentimes I think It's easy to feel repetitive and redundant when talking about your work by showing climbing and all the you know the floor plans they models or the photographs and it's Worth while to edit out, you know, all of that down to the most essential and Sort of meaningful drawings or images This book is also one of my favorite books designed by Yoon-ja and the team at 2x4 It's full of Fondazione Prada and car corner Della Regina and it was its book basically about you know, the activities and The art at this 18th century Palazzo in Venice, Italy I'm just gonna show you one spread from this book and this is my favorite part of the book This is a little bit arbitrary But I actually just really like these white floor plans blue paper and they actually work as chapter dividers Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they're four sections in this book and this page repeat itself with the beginning of each chapter and then These different rooms on depending on the floors are highlighted in a sky blue color to Make a connection between the content mentioned in the book and the maps and the location in the building Bootsy Vega this book is also designed by John Morgan and I'm showing you these examples because they have really also really beautiful documentation of and representation of their work But this book shows a really nice consistency in the way they present line drawings and plans In this case just like black and white Planned and then all the surrounding areas and blocks, you know covered in black ink Okay, so now that we've talked a little bit about images I just want to pause here to talk about the importance of image captions and Again, it's something that maybe some of us take for granted, but when you actually see an image with no caption You're kind of leading leaving the view up to guess what you know The image is about if it is you intend to leave the interpretation of the image up to the viewer then You can do away with the caption But in your case if it is really important for you to communicate what the significance of the images and it's worth while Having that caption so you could have a short caption As shown in the example in the middle or you could have a more descriptive sentence that explains the thought behind The the image itself So the other thing to note is that if you have a certain caption style in the book, it's important to be consistent And Then this is just a spread from I mean sorry a screenshot of what that particular project from her is I've been doing on that It's a project page from their website Also, it's worthwhile looking at these websites of different architectural practices to see how they talk about their work and And look out for any patterns that might inspire you and how you talk about your projects So I mean I think the pretty standard approach is to have a project title List the location the dates and then have a short description But the key really is to be consistent right in terms of the order of the content and the style in which all of this is written and I'm gonna follow up with a few more examples for this and this book I Believe is the first edition of this but for the architect Valeria Ojiati and it's a really It's a really nice object because all these Pages are printed on cardstock paper, but the double double-mounted and each page has a plate devoted to it What's nice about this is that This essay by Mario Carpo Runs across the entire book on the bottom. So it looks like a giant caption So regardless of where you are in the book you'll see this essay text from Mario Carpo and it feels like a global narrative and You know at glance at you know from a distance. It just looks like you know an enormous image caption when it's actually an essay The actual image caption or nestled above that text below the image But this book is also really wonderful as an object too And Then this recent monograph from Herzog and Jimmy on this is sort of like the polar opposite of most typical Architectural monographs. So this is a book called, you know one to five hundred and Basically, it just shows you the first five hundred projects But this went through an extreme editing process where they will show just one image per project So each bed will just show four projects So I met so that's a lot of pressure to boil down, you know, and What might be a more complex project down to just one image? And then each of these images have consistent ways of treating them with image captions a number name location and the dates and then lower show this example earlier with pre-Columbian art in New York this catalog Not only is it nice in terms of like the the way they treat the book as in terms of paper form and the materiality But I just want to zoom in on again with these image captions You have these black and white images these artifacts and then very consistent treatment of The captions but nestled next to the captions is that the ruler for scale measurements. So This just really emphasized that you can be More thoughtful and creative with it and caption is a very detailed element And I like what Laura said about treating her caption the same size as her text copy with one of her projects to Communicate sort of a designer's intent and so the detail is the work Next I want to talk to you about tone and character. So once you figure it out, you know This actually is not this is all this not meant to be a linear process internal work process But tone and character might be something you think about in the beginning of project it's important because It's sort of the impression that you want to leave on a reader and it's essentially like establishing a persona and everything that you do with the book design whether it's choosing a tight base to your layout design to images the content of the images The quality of the text the paper stock you choose the binding the book size all of that Contribute to a sense of tone and character and I want to show you two Two books that couldn't be more different from each other not only in terms of the visual of the book but the architects for which they're designed for and The book on the on the left is never modern design my John Morgan for six a architects and the book on the right is the archic comic book for Bianca English group called Yes, it's more so when you look at these they look really different right never modern has more white space It just seems more modest. It's in this service typography Simple and then you know has this quiet feeling yes, it's more is you know more dark There's more black ink on it the treat the type is this comic book style Treatment and it's just busy and it just it just feels ominous right and when you open the book They also look and feel very different right on the on the left side was never modern You have this essay text by in Renee Scalbert that talks about you know the Perspective of six a architects and they're approached architecture But it's in typeset in this big serif typography with a lot of white space and all the images are in black and white and then on in contrast to that with the yes This is more example. There are a lot more images for the most part packed into each bed and then all the text is in this speech bubble so it's meant to feel like a comic book and You know, they just couldn't be more different from each other in terms of the style on like the look in the aesthetic What's ironic about this is that I think when I look at these two books and you read about it a little bit The intent is actually the same they both want to seem approachable accessible and want to make a connection with the viewers so So what does this mean it you know, it's important to sort of verbalize in your head What those qualities are that you want to go for and there's no right or wrong answer It's all about where you want to be on the spectrum, right? So you could choose to be quiet versus loud soft hard simple complex traditional modern minimal maximal academic commercial Oh, sorry pretty ugly playful serious slow fast easy-going intense economical luxurious casual formal rough be fine Intimate cool, and then this list can just go on late So like I said, this is something that you can really think about in the beginning of the book design process, too and then finally I will wrap up by talking about one other project that I worked on and Once you've figured out all the details I think you need to actually just said this really well earlier before but once you've figured out all the details like you know The technical parts like the paper stock or like your typography and all except all of that Once you've made that book it really can transcend what it's you know The actual book itself for meaning and the value that it holds for people who may come across your book later on So I want to talk to you about this book project. I worked on with Martha McGill who is my classmate at Yale and we work with three editors for this project AJ Violet and Muscle and perspective like I said earlier is America's oldest student editor journal from Yale University and Because of school tradition the way it's done. It's actually a three-year-long project process and Before I go into detail. I want to talk show you this overview of some covers that preceded our Perspective so we worked on perspective 49 which came out in 2016 and And it's funny because I'm you know Ben and law I'm sure and you know when you work on a book the publisher might ask for the cover design Very early in the process even before you've designed it. So in the beginning we look at the covers Just to get a sense of what's been done before But the reason the real reason why I'm showing this slide is that Typically with prospectus they have like one word titles like money Amnesia agency taboo monster famous of building codes grand tour, etc and All of these words or most of them have very strong visual associations Tied to the word. So if you think of money, you know, you think of coins or dollar bills or hundred dollar bills, whatever Monsters, you know, again another clear visual association ours the title was called quote and We were you know, we don't really have a visual association with quote. It's more variable So, you know, it was the editor statement Which is crafted in the very beginning of process was very clear But you know, it was actually a pretty complex subject matter for us At the especially at the beginning when we had no content to work with in the beginning Anyway, so I'm going to read out really short editors a condensed editor statement for a quote And it is an exploration of quotation appropriation and plagiarism Arguing that quotation and associated operations are ubiquitous intentional and vital and architecture Yeah, so that's a lot of like words packed in and you know, you probably I still don't know what it means So I'll show you examples of What the editors meant by quote by showing you These things that we discussed in the beginning of the editorial process Quote as we all know it is, you know words paraphrase like words written by another person So when you write essays you and you quote someone you put that those sentences in between quotation marks Right, so that's the way we understand what a quote is But the act of quotation can mean many different things In this case it can mean plagiarism. So Maybe many of you know about this project, but the building on the left is this building designed by Zaha D. It's called one You can so how it's a multi-use complex built in Beijing It was controversial because I Literally exactly the same time the building on the right was going up in the city of Chongqing and so And I believe it may have been completed faster like Earlier than the Zaha D one, but it's the building on the right is called make one 22nd century biters developer and so people at Zaha D were ready to file a lawsuit and You know, it was highly suspected that the developer basically pirated stole the digital files from Zaha Hadid And so I don't know the full details of the lawsuit, but Going into that kind of process with the later construction process. So And I think I read this recently, but the developer wrote on their site Basically denying that they plagiarized and said we don't mean to copy. We only mean to surpass which is ridiculous But the buildings are identical And it's it's a notorious case, unfortunately Quotation happens a lot in fashion and in other fields creative fields as well, but a lot in fashion and the building That's like the code on the right is from saline by the phylo saline collection from fall 2013 and It's this great code with, you know, knotted sleeves and when it came out this fashion writer pointed out hey, there was this You know remarkable similarity to Jeffrey beans coat back from back in 2004 So people reached out to the team at Jeffrey beans So Jeffrey bean had already passed away by the time this coat from saline had come out But the representatives at that fashion house were basically like they were not surprised and they said, you know Jeffrey the late designers he's inspired many designers who came after him So it was seen in the light of homage and not plagiarism So it's a good form of quotation flattery Imitation to sincerest form of flattery. They say the best form of quotation as we understand is when you take Not the visual component of something but the ideals and ideas in some body of work or you know or something and Translated into something completely new. So look, you know, many architects were inspired by the Parthenon and You know, it's very well known that look of reserve was also inspired by the classical ideas of the Parthenon and Athens So there were associations made with his less of a building in France and the Parthenon and Then to us, you know with a lot of technological tools at all disposal Quotation can really mean replicating things really easily with, you know, the Invention of 3d scanning 3d printing sketch up all these software programs that allow us to really quickly make things and mimic things So that's the that gives you a better sense of what quotation meant in the in the context of this issue This is just an overview of all the content that we have to deal with so in the like I said in the beginning We get this TOC or a list of all the essays that we will deal with It's a three-year long process. So that means most of that time is spent With with the editors reaching out to different contributors for perspective the design itself does not should take three years and so The challenge for Martha and myself as we were working on this book Was how do you come up with the design concept approach when you don't really have the essays or the content yet? And and you're just working with the concept and sort of the list of You know essays and authors that you'll be working with later on But as I showed you through the examples So quote quote is not just you know a textual thing, but it can you know relate to the world of images as well So our challenge was to convey the concept of quote through the way we treat texts and images in the book Conceptively right so I want to talk to you about how we chose our Typefaces in this book and we chose to one was no house growth task and the other was optimal Nova The reason why we chose those two typefaces is Well after doing a you know a really Kind of an exploration of all these different possible sensor You know classical ones that we could work with we landed a no house growth task And we just knew we wanted to work with Revival funds a lot of funds actually are revival funds technically speaking because for instance, you know With the computer a lot of them have to be digitized so that's became an opportunity for type designers to work on spacing and Redrawing these things so that they will put people screens and printing in today's world But anyway, just a brief story about Helvetica. No house go task No house go task is a revival of Helvetica Helvetica used to be called no house go task Back in the 1950s Edward Hoffman of Haas type boundary in Switzerland Needed to come up with a grotesque typeface that would compete well with Occident's grotesque at the time Occident's grotesque was sort of the adored Sensor of typeface in Swiss graphic design at the time So he asked Max Midinger who's the designer in the far left corner To come up with the new grotesque typeface and he drew what became Helvetica was no house go task They changed the name to Helvetica because I believe was for marketing reasons Helvetica means the Swiss and But you know, of course with changes in printing processes from metal to line of type photo setting That original design for a no house go task underwent a lot of changes and compromises. So in the early 2000 Christian Swartz was commissioned to be by no house go task or Helvetica So the no house go test you see today is closer to the original designs for Helvetica so You'll see differences if you look really closely But anyway, so we chose no house go tasks over Helvetica As we buy typeface and then the other typeface we chose was optimal Nova Optima was designed by a German type type designer named Herman Zaff and He in 1950 here. Also. This was all designed around the same time both no house go task and optima But anyway in 1950 Herman Zaff went to Florence for the first time on holiday and then he went into this Cemetery and he saw these Classical woman letterings Stone carved in the cemetery and he really liked them in the way that it's a humanist typeface So the ends of the letters don't quite become serifs and he really liked that quality So he made sketches on a thousand Leroy note from back to Germany Respawn and he basically developed this typeface over the course of the next decade or so but Again with technological changes It was necessary for optima to revive to its original form So Akira Kobayashi and Herman Zaff work together to come up with optimal Nova so those were two typebases for this project and We had some restrictions for instance the book size had to be 9 by 12, right and This is not something I will not go into detail now, but Martha and I just decided to split the group the book grid system into six columns So it would allow for a lot more flexibility in laying out different kinds of content throughout different chapters And we really wanted tight margins. This is just random. We just want to tie margins and and the other thing is that something I discovered and I think it depends on the printer that you work with but Printing a thick book with a lot of pages can sometimes cost more than printing full color, right? So we want to be economical with space and the other thing to note is that We did have a printing budget limit, right? So we knew it would be expensive to print in full color So we decided to treat all our images in black and white This is just to show you a spread of how you utilize the six-column grid system And then the dotted line that you see at the top is our hang line And we use the six-column grid in a number of different ways throughout the whole book but it allows for a lot more flexibility and Because the book is called quote We we actually just you know instead of a standard Chapter opener where we start with the title of the article and author's name We actually prefaced each essay with a compelling quote That we thought was interesting and then typeset that in optimal Nova put them in big quotation marks and then Pair them with a footnote symbol. So actually no Haskell task and optimal Nova don't they don't have a ton of a footnote Symbols in the glyph system. So we went to other type bases and got footnote symbols from them. So print, you know, I shown here and Then just just to show you a close-up of the quote pages and we paper want We were able to get one Pantone color of mint green, which is actually also Random, so I'm just saying some things can be random like most things can be thought of or some things can be random But I actually I can rationalize this decision-making process, but that's for another time This is show you overview of all the essays With this mint Pantone green color treatment and the quotes and the footnote symbols And then when you go past the quote page, you will get The repeat of that footnote symbol on a smaller scale and then the beginning of the essays And then I believe we had a total of four different type sizes for the entire book and Any text that was quoted by you know words by somebody else we treated in a light, you know a great color So these were all these moves that we made to Make that connection like as from the design point with the book title in the concept quote So when it came to images that was a whole not a different set of challenges of how we lay out the images that would convey the concept of quote Quotation and this is an image. That was actually shown in the book. It's the exhibition wall from late 1970s exhibition on architecture from MoMA and it was controversial because basically I believe the exhibition was called transformation in modern architecture What the curator did was just put lots of images of similar-looking buildings on the wall so it was you know Controversial in in the statement saying that architectures has all the buildings are looking at the same and so what? You know visually it's kind of cool to look at and Martha and I were like It would be really cool to just have a lot and lots and lots of similar-looking images throughout the book Right and again when you are when you begin to design or come up with concepts for a book before even have the content It's kind of tricky because you don't you're not really responding to the content You're just kind of fantasizing and about the kind of visuals you want to make as a designer We also fantasize about having a lot of side-by-sides but the editors try to talk us down every time we try to propose that idea and But as I showed you with those examples of quotation what they mean It can mean armies plagiarism, etc The term quote in quotation actually much more nuanced and complex So it wouldn't make sense to have this one big gesture across the whole book in terms of image treatment So really what we were doing was responding to each essay and the argument at hand and the way to talk about quotation And we would lay out the images based on that concept or the argument So there are different things that we could do, you know with images that would metaphorically connect to the idea of quotation You could reprint images You could show the side-by-side You can show an archive of images. You can show repetition of images or a timeline You can also frame these various images Or you can imitate a visual style image treatment. You can cut out images and You can also copy or scan images And then I'll just show you how we actually did that in some of these places So this was the reprint of an essay from an older issue of perspective that the editors chose to include and then this is a side-by-side of You know art or artifacts replicated through 3D scanning of 3D printing. We showed archives from other books We show a bunch of similar looking images like repetition of similar looking buildings from Russia Or we could show a timeline of images This essay was about you know the influence of the Parthenon throughout time and how there were many similar looking Parthenons in different parts of the world You could also frame these images And then this was the This thing we made in imitation of Robert McStan's graphic design style Psychological style and it was something that was requested by the author of that article who was Thomas Weber. He's the editor of AA Files You could also show cutouts of these different images Or you can copy or scan these images So this was a proposal for the Young Architects program proposal for PS1 MoMA Yeah, and that's pretty much it and then I want to end by showing you this quote from the last essay in this book And I I want to read it because I think it's um I'll end with a quote because it's talking about quote, but it's I think pretty compelling It's just basically you know the argument at hand here and in a way I think it's the conclusion of the whole book is that quotation is necessary and it can be hopeful So in architecture as in life quotation is really all that matters and no Transcendental individualism can ever replace the richness of a world full of weapons nuance and illusion Yeah stack of books. Thank you