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2009 Annual Design Review
Graphics
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Best of Category
601
ARTBOOK
PROJECT
2008
EXCELLENT DESIGN CAN SLAP you square in the face or take shape slowly. Sometimes, it does both. From the moment our judges picked it up, the 601 Artbook Project catalog was clearly different: its long, wordless introduction, with A’s and B’s hanging from silhouetted branches; its text-over-text printing; its photographs running across non-sequential spreads; and its child-like drawings. Essentially, the catalog, created out of winning art books from an annual competition, is much less a book than an immersion—an evolving experience in color, texture, typography, and illustration that engages readers’ senses and seems to change depending on where and how one enters the book. Various-width pages, for example, encourage studying certain sections while flipping quickly past others; the lightweight stock of the introductory pages makes the reader pause and stay for a moment inside a leafy moiré forest.
Was it a winner? Early on, not all the judges thought so. “I really like this, but I think it could be more rigorous,” said Glauber. “I’m worried that its concept may overshadow its craft.” Yet as the competition narrowed, the book stayed in the running, and soon, Geissbuhler put his money on it: “This one is solid—the layout, the binding, the typography,” he declared. “Cover to cover, it’s beautiful.” Clearly impressed by the book’s mixed styles and free flow—the very thing Glauber wasn’t crazy about—he saw it as uniting both a designer’s precision and a fine artist’s grace and intuition. Ernstberger concurred. “I like this, too,” he said. “It’s very modern even as it’s traditional.” By late afternoon, Glauber was softening. “Okay, I’m signing on to this,” she said. “I can see how it’s working, and it really is a beautiful piece.” The 601 Artbook eventually emerged as the winner for the way it redefines what and how a reader’s experience with a book—and with design—can be.
Design 601bisang (Seoul): Kum-jun Park, designer
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