The Good Design Book

Layout Sneak Peek

So, design-wise, here’s how the book is shaping up. I’ve picked five random spreads (below) to give you a sense of how we’re handling the work. Some spreads are dedicated to a single project, such as Office’s wonderful work for 826 Valencia (top) or the collaborative effort between Volume, Inc and Mende Design for Southern Exposure Gallery.

Most projects don’t actually receive their own spread, but almost all occupy their own page. A few spreads — like the very bottom one shown here with work by Stefan Sagmeister — are given over to a single image.

Sometime next week I’ll drop in a peek at some of the text pages, interviews and case studies.

Purely by coincidence, much of the text on these spreads is out of frame but trust me, we’re writing about everything.

Good Friday: Design Presentation

Today we send off our design sketches to HOW. Technically we’re only supposed to show three prototypical spreads, and there is actually no requirement to show more than one option. We’re showing about six spreads each for two different directions. We explored a third direction also, but for reasons I’ve already discussed, we’re limiting it to two.

My preference is for option B (below). It allows the work to be shown bigger and the text to be more prominent. I also think it pushes the medium of book design a little harder than option A, but without marginalizing the content.

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