When Creative Director Magnus Naddermier was hired by the Paris-based gallery Andréhn-Schiptjenko to design Shorelines—the first publication covering the works of American painter Ridley Howard—he decided to use the Display variant of the McQueen family.

Using a lot of white space to let the pictures work, the high-contrast typeface acts as the perfect counterpoint to the romantic yet neutral paintings.

It was printed by the Swedish Göteborgstryckeriet as a thread-bound hardcover book with flat foil-stamping on the cover and an offset printed dust jacket (specifically for all the print nerds out there, they used Munken Polar paper 150g combined with Finesse 66010 for the cloth, Scandia 2000 for the inlay and Geltex 251 LS the endpapers).

The book Fordlândia is the outcome of a research project and an art residency organized by the Suspended spaces collective, which took place on a boat on the Tapajòs river in Brazil. The boat navigated between the cities of Santàrem and Fordlândia. The latter was devised by American industrial Henry Ford, who decided in 1928 to cut into the Amazon forest in order to set up his own rubber production for the tires of Ford cars. The project was a disaster, as Ford failed to evaluate the weather, the agricultural and the human variables. The goal of this residency was hence to explore the history and legacy of Fordlândia as an encounter of industry and colonialism with the ecological stakes of the Amazon forest.

The title as seen on the cover and on the huge spine of the book is set in Boreal from Production Type, a choice by designer Jean-Claude Chianale. On the spine, Boreal takes the whole space – a visual metaphor for how Ford tried to settle and take advantage of a territory. On the cover, the roles change: the title is embossed into the cover and disappears into the drawing of the map – the territory is taking over. Boreal is a “neutral”, highly legible font, convenient for corporate identity, administrative uses, etc.; here we see how it can evoke industrial and technical worlds, contrasting with the serpentine isolines of the wild untamable territory.

The interior of the bilingual publication (Portuguese and French) is set in Adobe Caslon. Fordlândia was published by Les Presses du Réel in October 2020 as Suspended spaces #05.

The book comes with a folded poster that serves both as a map and an index.

On the map (shown in the background), the circled numbers from Adobe Caslon are paired with labels and page numbers in Boreal.

Our recently founded Vienna based design bureau Hazod Schlagintweit is focused on projects in the fields of art, culture and industry. We create visual identities, books and magazines – which led us to work on self-initiated book projects. After doing a redesign for Austrias biggest food magazine in 2016 we came up with the idea of a magazine that also dealt with this topic but in a more authentic and edgy way.

In the publication named Salz (“Salt”), various graphic designers and artists are dealing with the topic of salt. As a result different interpretations were formed and embedded in stories about places, nature, people and the far-reaching topic of culinary art. Salt is not just a declaration of love for the raw material that gives the food the necessary flavor, but can also be seen as a metaphor for the flavor of life itself.

The two-part publication has two different screen printed covers. The aesthetics of the book are very much influenced by the risography printing technique, which has led to a reduced, bright color scheme.

Schick Toikka’s Chap is applied throughout the whole book and is strongly integrated in the design as its shapes reminded us of salt crystals.

Awarded by Die Schönsten Bücher Österreichs (“The most beautiful books of Austria”) in its 2018 competition in the “special edtions and non-commercial” category.

Entrance to SFABF

Identity for the San Francisco Art Book Fair 2019 set in Solenizant by Laïc: Type and Sporting Grotesque by Velvetyne Type.

AIGA Eye on Design published a short note in Design Diary No. 253 about the design:

Design studio MacFadden & Thorpe has recently created the identity for the San Francisco Art Book Fair, which will take place from July 19-21. “This is the first year the organizers have had an outside design studio do the graphics and we’re really happy with how they came out,” says studio co-founder Brett McFadden. “Fun, colorful, weird.” The logo itself is based on the idea of a “sloppy stack of books sitting on the floor,” he adds. As well as creating posters and promo images to be used on social, he’s designing the rest of the fair’s collateral, event signage and merch such as some lovely baseball caps and tote bags. We’re really into the ’60s-ish vibes of the whole thing; and the mixture of strict grids and a bit of loopiness.

Official SFABF Merch Store during the fair

SFABF Program

SFABF

From Eremenko Visual Communication:

“The Verge is an art project based on documentary photographic materials from the Second World War. After working in various photography archives, I came up with the idea of tracing the lives of individuals during this period. Previously unknown negatives from Soviet and German sources allow us to see the everyday realities of the war from both sides.”

The photographs from the Arthur Bondar Collection are introduced with an English-language text by Arthur Bondar and a Russian/Cyrillic summary (not shown here), all set with various weights of CoFo Sans. It comes in a cardboard case with a screen printed title. More information can be found on a dedicated single page website in an English and a Russian version.

Can art bridge across geographies and gaps of knowledge?What connects Sápmi, Surinam and Switzerland? How do Christianity and Vodun intersect? Do Karen Blixen and Fidel Castro share common beliefs? What might seem far removed, share close bonds when we look beyond national and historic divisions.

The publication BAT: Bridging Art + Text, just released by Hurricane Publishing, looks into complex historical and current connections across the globe presenting international artists, scholars, curators and writers in 3 volumes of 800+ pages. The book, curated and edited by Michelle Eistrup, presents contemporary artists born or based in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and the US creating an insight into aesthetics not often presented in Scandinavia.

The first volume shows connections between art, performance and religion. In the second volume, artists and writers deal with racism as well as the omission of voice and identity. The third volume gathers artists and writers who actively critique history and its influence on present times.

The transfer of cultural and spiritual knowledge from Africa across the Atlantic and further towards Europe show the potential and strength of maintaining a shared cultural heritage. The strength of bridging creates ways of facing racism and prejudice and seeing old and new connections.

TakeTakeTake is a small publishing house based in Prague, Czech Republic. Under its name is the production of original books, silkscreen posters and illustrations. They focus on Czech book covers from the 1950s to the 1980s, clear typography, visually contrasting and strong illustration, high quality fonts, print, paper and book binding almost on the edge of bibliophile branch.

http://taketaketake.cz

The cover typography of the first three issues (Prázdná židle by Richard Weiner, Obraz pekla by Rjúnosuke Akutagawa, Plášť by Nikolaj Vasiljevič Gogol) combines Tabac Glam (2016) with Tabac Sans.

The book interior is set in Tabac.

The cover design for Neviditelný by Jaroslava Havlíčka features a single glyph from BC Steiner Headline. Illustrations by Maria Makeeva.

Chapter titles are set in BC Steiner, too.

Velebnost, melancholie, hrůza by Karel Klostermann uses BC Prkno on the cover, the back cover as well as for headlines. Illustrations by Jindřich Janíček.

Three related projects by Experimental Jetset, all published by Roma Publications. Statement And Counter-Statement is an archive of Experimental Jetset’s work, accompanied by various essays and other texts. The cover is adapted from the smaller publication, Automatically Arranged Alphabets, an experimental zine with software-generated compositions using glyphs from Neue Helvetica. Arts/Rats/Star is a tote bag with similar compositions of jumbled glyphs.

The Witching Hour, published in 2014 by B42 with both French and English text, serves as the catalogue for a group exhibition held at Le Quartier in Quimper, France. It follows a 2013 publication, Witches: hunted, appropriated, empowered, queered. Both publications were edited by Anna Colin and use ITC Tyfa prominently.

Tightly spaced Riccione and colorful patterns unify the cover designs for the Antennae series of art theory and criticism books. The ongoing series – designed by Metahaven and published by Valiz – was selected among the “Best Dutch Book Designs” for 2009.

Too Active To Act is a “polemic pamphlet about art and society” from BAVO, released by Dutch publisher Valiz. The book investigates the relationship between art and activism and the effectiveness of art to bring about change.

From the MoMA Library tumblr:

Books Make Friends! Great title from the exhibition catalog of the 2006 survey of the first 90 books published by the excellent Roma Publications.