I was approached by the publisher Edward Booth-Clibborn to design a monograph on a little-known French artist, Henri Barande, who was going to have an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London.
I began by visiting the artist at his studio in Lausanne, Switzerland. The scale of the space – a long, slim former workshop – impressed me. We spent the whole day together. I witnessed how he worked, we discussed the book and got to know each other.
The highlight was when Barande began hanging his work on the walls, changing the juxtaposition of paintings. It was then that I understood how important his hanging technique was and how each painting would take on another meaning when he worked on it more and the composition changed.
Barande is decisive and unconventional, but most of all experimental, which is always an advantage when designing a book, though it can bring unforeseen challenges.
It was clear that we had to make something special and that I needed to come up with a form of identity for the artist’s book that would stand out, but also convey his work and personality. However, a book also needs structure.
I discovered that Barande did not date or number his work, nor did he sign it. That meant there could be no captions or chronological order to this monograph – not the easiest conditions to enable bringing form to content.
Schultzschultz, my studio in Frankfurt, often designs fonts so we discussed the project and decided to collaborate with Barande on the monograph. My studio colleagues reasoned that using only one painting as a cover illustration would misrepresent Barande’s aesthetic. So we made an algorithm to enable a series of images to be randomly combined, one after another, to complement the artist’s technique of presentation.
A hefty 8,500 cover combinations were produced then hand selected. Schultzschultz customised a font for the book’s title, which features distinct cuts in each character that create greater sharpness when viewed from a distance. This concept was also inspired by Barande’s work, which plays with resolution and distance of the viewer to the canvas.
The book was produced after many one-to-one sessions with Barande. To achieve the best publication possible, Barande and I laid out his favourite paintings and tried to find the most successful combination.
The outcome of weeks of hanging, rehanging, swapping and interchanging paintings in the studio is captured in the book. We worked long and hard to create a flow that had a visual logic. We worked every day, met twice in person and had numerous Skype calls each day towards the end. It was a particularly rewarding process because we had time to grasp what we were creating on a daily basis.
Christoph Stolberg is the creative director of the German design firm Schultzschultz.
Henri Barande is on at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 4-31 October
I began by visiting the artist at his studio in Lausanne, Switzerland. The scale of the space – a long, slim former workshop – impressed me. We spent the whole day together. I witnessed how he worked, we discussed the book and got to know each other.
The highlight was when Barande began hanging his work on the walls, changing the juxtaposition of paintings. It was then that I understood how important his hanging technique was and how each painting would take on another meaning when he worked on it more and the composition changed.
Barande is decisive and unconventional, but most of all experimental, which is always an advantage when designing a book, though it can bring unforeseen challenges.
It was clear that we had to make something special and that I needed to come up with a form of identity for the artist’s book that would stand out, but also convey his work and personality. However, a book also needs structure.
I discovered that Barande did not date or number his work, nor did he sign it. That meant there could be no captions or chronological order to this monograph – not the easiest conditions to enable bringing form to content.
Schultzschultz, my studio in Frankfurt, often designs fonts so we discussed the project and decided to collaborate with Barande on the monograph. My studio colleagues reasoned that using only one painting as a cover illustration would misrepresent Barande’s aesthetic. So we made an algorithm to enable a series of images to be randomly combined, one after another, to complement the artist’s technique of presentation.
A hefty 8,500 cover combinations were produced then hand selected. Schultzschultz customised a font for the book’s title, which features distinct cuts in each character that create greater sharpness when viewed from a distance. This concept was also inspired by Barande’s work, which plays with resolution and distance of the viewer to the canvas.
The book was produced after many one-to-one sessions with Barande. To achieve the best publication possible, Barande and I laid out his favourite paintings and tried to find the most successful combination.
The outcome of weeks of hanging, rehanging, swapping and interchanging paintings in the studio is captured in the book. We worked long and hard to create a flow that had a visual logic. We worked every day, met twice in person and had numerous Skype calls each day towards the end. It was a particularly rewarding process because we had time to grasp what we were creating on a daily basis.
Christoph Stolberg is the creative director of the German design firm Schultzschultz.
Henri Barande is on at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 4-31 October
