new book design

design: Andreas Laeufer
project: Mined
To open is to destroy. The cover is nothing more than shrinkwrapped polythene - the yellow block on the front is in the fact stuckon to the plastic. The book does not seek to hide the industrial techniques in its production; the binding is raw and exposed. The pages have not been trimmed down which means would- viewers require a lot of commitment. Not only do they have to rip off the cover, they then have to tear the pages to see the content. Sandwiched in the middle of the thick volume are 'tools for life' -a pair of scissors and some thread. Are they there to assist with the healing necessary after the many acts of destruction the reader must carry out to access the book itself?

design: Aboud Sodano (case:Jonathan Ive)
project: You Can Find Inspiration in Everything
Expanded polystyrene is used as the outer packaging for this book about the British fashion designer Paul Smith. The form echoes that of a large leather-bound volume. The packaging provides more than just protection for the book during shipping; it becomes a kind of dust jacket that is both disposable and cherishable. Inside this custom case, the polystyrene structure carefully holds in place the book itself, which comes in a variety of cloth covers, all cut froma selectionof the designer's textiles. In fact, owing to the varying crops of the different clothes, eachcover is unique. The buyer has no idea what his or her cover will loke like until the protective case has been cracked open.
The casing also houses a Paul Smith branded magnifying glass, partially as a visual pun on the title of the book: 'You Can Find Inspiration in Everything' - And If You Can't, Look Again!'

design: Michael Worthington
project: Uta Barth: Nowhere Near & Uta Barth:..And in Time
These two books, produced in 1999 and 2000, show the work of the photographer Uta Barth. The same design scheme has been used in both. This set the often bleached-out images in large areas of text-free white space. Both volumes have essays at the back; these are set using a palette of muted, pale colours that reflect the hue of the photography.

design: Michael Worthington
project: Uta Barth: In Between Places
Containing essays, gallery views and full-page images, this book has a variety of paces. Full-bleed images continue on preceding and following pages, contrasting with much smaller reproductions which are given ample space in which to breath.

Restart: New systems in Graphic Design

{ Colorface colour font, 1999 }

{ Joshua Berger argues that language ' is anything that communicates information'. }
Type is no longer merely the letters and punctuatiion marks that form words, sentences and paragraphs, but 'the building blocks of meaning in whatever form that meaning arises. Type can be image. Type can be sound. Type can be a color. When you adopt this view and immediately you are faced with a world that is entirely typographic, everything around you becomes part of a vocabulary. Made by randomly selecting colours (or notes) that are matched to letters, the fonts lend itself to colourful (or noisy) renditions of texts. Despite being called fonts they are not typefaces, but alphabetic codes: the typeface is not read it is decoded by the viewer.While Berger's colour font may not be your typical strict typographic font, it raises pertinent questions about the nature of typographic meaning.

{ Speech recognizing letterforms, 1999 }

Andreas Lauhoff has taken type's muteness and has attempted to give it a human voice, using a system whereby patterns of speech can be conveyed by letterforms. He made a speech-waveform image of recorded spoken words, dividing the waveforms into small sections that correspond to the enuciation of each letter. The letterforms, made from a transparent material that renders their structure ever-apparent, ooze elegent, pseudo-scientific restraint. Lauoff has demonstrated the system's potential by transcribing a section of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001 - Space Odyssey. Addressing the computer "Hal" several times, David Bowman's tone becomes increasingly demanding and, as a result, Lauhoff's extruded letterforms raise in pitch and become larger and jagged.

more flash sites of interest

http://neovision.jp/

This flash site employes a mosaic structure {grid} for displaying images for purchase that moves horizontally at various speeds. Once you chose the image you can grab and drag it to the bottom of the screen to buy. You can control the navigation speed of the pictures, color of the background and view of the pictures from mosaic or normal, also you can employ keywords to navigate to a specific image of interest. There is also a catalogue option window to navigate more images that are included in the catalogues. I really find this navigation very appealing because it allows you to view the photo's all juxtaposed together in a grid that reveals itself little by little.

http://www.muzyczny.org/

The structure of this flash site is very close in comparison to a slot machine. A slot machine structure is pretty interesting to use in juxtaposing the images and the transition from one set of information to another. Each transition of information and imagery is colored with either red or blue or both. The imagery I have noticed is halftone screen that compliments the two colors used.

http://www.crew11.net/

The use of macro & micro is employed to show the products {which is these little characters in boxes}. By clicking on each individual character's box it is brought to the foreground to reveal itself and by clicking again it flips to the back of the packaging to inform the consumer of the contents. I really like the identities of the characters and the packaging because they each communicate in their own way.