Research - Innovation in Book Design by Charlotte Rivers [Book]

"... it was widely believed that we would see the demise of the book given the fact that so much information was being made available on the internet. But in fact ... Book sales have continued to rise year on year and the format has become a much-loved and much-needed antidote to our increasingly technology-driven world." 

Relating to Irma Boom's idea of what makes a book different to a PDF or text online? Need to focus on allowing the book to be something that can't be experienced on a screen. 

Kid Acne
Design: Paul Reardon
Publisher: Robert Horne Group

"We wanted to do a lot of mixing and matching of colours, which made it a challenge to get it working harmoniously... We used French folds so that we could have more control over where we placed colours and we also used shortfall pages for the interview sections in order to get strips of colour next to each other... developed an intricate wraparound that interlocks two sheets of different tints."
For my idea of shared living the techniques used to combine colours in sections might be effective.

french folds: http://pitchdesignunion.com/2009/03/04/french-fold-books/ Paul Hekkert by Chris van Diemen. 

AGI: New Voice
Design: Jianping He
Publisher: Hesign Publishing

Less conceptual ideas but created in an unexpected and interesting method that pushes the boundaries of traditional book making - think 3D as that can't be experienced the same way digitally.
The use of an unexpected binding technique as it's more effective for the design - adjusting the production to fit the concept. "As the cover has an ear on the bind, it proved difficult to find a binding technique that would work. Therefore an old traditional Chinese binding method was used."

Brett Phillips
3 Deep Design

When approaching book design, what inspires you? "As part of the design process, and working beyond an initial concept, there will no doubt be many points of inspiration - historical reference, cultural influences, personal collections, one's own individual design sensibility... All of these things will help shape the final design outcome but i think that the content - the proposition - should really drive any initial response."


karlssonwilker's 12 Days in Serbia
Design: Jan Wilker and Hjalti Karlsson
Publisher: FIA Art Group/Publikum

"Karlsson and Jan Wilker went to Serbia for 12 days to explore Serbian design and culture then offered their views, interpretations and findings to a Serbian and International audience... each day they created one piece of work influenced by what they heard, saw, experienced, and ate resulting in a "real-time design" adventure."
Due to the target audience, the book is bilingual in English and Serbian. To save space, they ran both texts together with English in blue and Serbian in red with almost no leading. This creates a sense of community/unity and allows for both language texts to be treated the same. To make this more legible, they provided a vellum sheet with white stripes printed on to block out the other lines depending on which language wants to be read.
The use of labelling an image is very direct/simplistic but very effective in presenting information and could be used for my own project as a way of communicating content to multiple readers at once - not necessarily bilingual.


Jennifer Steinkamp
Design: Geoff Kaplan/Gail Swanlund
Publisher: Prestel Verlag/San Jose Museum of Art

The book's theme is to represent kinetic qualities and movement therefore the front cover is a lenticular image of the author's work which directly conveys the idea of movement in a 2D form and provides an experience for the viewer based on how they look at the book which cannot be created digitally as a gif doesn't depend on how the viewer looks at it.
"Throughout, the book's orientation switches from portrait to landscape to play on the idea of moving between reading spreads and looking through windows into the work" Using orientation to represent an experience - in this case moving your POV.
"We asked Jennifer for references and inspirations for each piece of work... We pooled all the nouns from her references and converted them into drawings." A possible method of collecting information about a personal experience ? Relates to conveying my experience of my location.