Fuck Yeah, Book Arts!

Fully Booked: Ink On Paper by Gestalten

I’ll level with you here, we’re getting pretty tired of the print vs digital debate. We love the endless scroll and unbridled sharing of the internet just as much as we love the tactility and uniquely possessive nature of books. Can’t we all just get along here guys? Still, when Gestalten get in touch with news that they’re producing a volume dedicated to the very best in book design and print innovation it IS pretty tempting to tell digital where to shove it.

But we’d never stoop that low. We’d rather celebrate the arrival of this fresh new tome, Fully Booked: Ink On Paper, by telling you that it celebrates the very best of what print does well; foiling, debossing, Japanese binding, experimental print techniques, unique formats and really exceptional design. It’s reassuringly full of work by some of the finest practitioners and publishers in the world today, and as you’d expect from a work that wrestles with such weighty content, it’s beautifully designed too.

So enough of the squabbling everybody, print’s still going strong, but that doesn’t mean you have to set fire to your iPad; it’s much more exciting to live in a world in which we can celebrate books on the internet and glorify gadgets in print. (Source: itsnicethat.com)

Stuff We Really Like

theoinglis:

“Jason Booher designs book covers as well as other things”

fer1972:

Edgar Allan Poe Tales Illustrations by Pavel Ripley (Artist on tumblr)

I used to be a design student is a new publication by Camberwell BA Graphic Design alumni Frank Phillipin and Billy Kiosoglou (Brighten the Corners)

The inspiration for the book came from a talk Frank and Billy gave to Camberwell students. For the talk they decided to present a series of old student projects alongside work they had completed since graduating.

The students responded extremely well to the talk, not only in terms of being able to relate to the student projects, but also to the fact that through seeing a ‘then’ and ‘now’ the idea of becoming a professional designer appeared far more attainable. Realising that other people’s work would offer similar insights the idea for the book was born.

50 designers were invited to share one student project and one professional project for inclusion in the book. They were also asked to offer a piece of advice and a warning!

(Source: blogs.arts.ac.uk)

This idea of digital archeology has been explored by Graphic Designer Boris Meister from ECAL University of Art and Design, Lausanne Switzerland. The book, Above the Cloud is an atlas about social networks archeology, death and digital marks left in distress on the internet. Over 6 million Facebook accounts belong to dead people or ‘Ghosts’, and Meister explores how people continue ‘Semi-Living’ through interactions from friends.

Epitaphs are also explored through the last messages written on social networks before dying. An example is Taylor Sauer who posted:  “I can’t discuss this now. Driving and facebooking is not safe! Haha.” on Facebook one minute before she had a fatal car accident.

(Source: itsagoldrush.wordpress.com)

containercorps:

Recordings is a series of books that are the result of a physical interaction between the printer and the offset press. Colors are added to the press during printing following a predetermined “score.” The act of printing becomes an act of performance, and the book is the evidence of its occurrence. Recordings conflate books and sculpture. They use the machinery of mechanical reproduction to create visual records of specific, unrepeatable conditions of color and change.

visual-poetry:

“word as image” by ji lee

[more information about the book]

A short but moving documentary on a dying breed of artisans: featuring LA’s oldest printing press Aardvark Letterpress, and speciality paper shop McManus & Morgan.

(via shahirzag)