Making a book means undertaking a complex task which is eminently collective. In addition to those who create content, design it and print the resulting book, other roles and knowledge must be involved whose participation is not always visible from the outside. This session will review all of the agents involved in editorial publishing, as well as some of the types of balance that can be established between such roles throughout the work process.

In her professional career, Mela Dávila Freire has combined institutional work – at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Museo Reina Sofía, among others– with research,writing, editing and curating. Her work focuses in particular on artist publications and art archives, spanning topics such as the theoretical and practical overlaps between archives and art collections, the ideological biases in archival structures,and the feminist revision of the genre of artists’ publications.

Her most recent book, Mission and Commission: documenta and the Art Market, 1955 – 1968, deals with the relationship between the early documenta exhibitions and the incipient art market through the publication of multiples and graphic works.

Flexible System Design, the 21st Century Skill

In a world of constant change, everything rigid will break. We need to unlearn static approaches and learn to see, understand, and design flexible systems. Martin Lorenz will talk about the main shifts we need to make in System Design if we want to be prepared for a better future.

Dr. Martin Lorenz (1977, Hannover, Germany) graduated in Graphic Design at the KABK after previously studying communication design in Darmstadt, Germany. He founded TwoPoints.Net studio with Lupi Asensio and completed a master’s degree and a PhD at the UB, Spain, writing a doctoral thesis on flexible visual systems in communication design.

Since 2003 he has taught at several European universities. He currently teaches at Elisava, Barcelona, and flexiblevisualsystems.info.

The design studio TwoPoints.Net was founded in 2007 with the aim to do exceptional design work. Work that is tailored to the client’s needs, work that excites the client’s customers, work that hasn’t been done before, work that does more than work.

Printed stuff
Fanette Mellier works in an artisanal way in her studio in Paris. She practices a radical and colorful graphic design. She will present in this conference her latest projects: visual identities for cultural structures, typographical plaids, and experimental books produced in parallel. Lots of printed stuff!

Specializing in print design, Fanette Mellier (1977) creates mainly atypical works in the cultural field. Besides commissioned work, through which she handles several themes, Mellier invests herself in experimental projects that freely shuffle fundamental aspects of graphic design: typography, color, printing process and relation to public spaces.

Her works have been displayed in numerous contemporary art museums and centres, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.

Design for the Times

The New York Times Magazine is known for bringing together ambitious journalism, powerful visuals and daring typographic systems. Creative Director, Gail Bichler will discuss how her team approaches designing for the diverse range of content that the magazine publishes including designing for current events in real-time.

She will talk about the current role of the magazine within the larger context of the Times, give a behind the scenes look at how their conceptual covers are made, and share her thoughts on the role of experimentation in everything from the magazine’s special issues to their digital presence to some of their forays into other mediums like audio and print only sections of the paper.

Gail Bichler is the creative director of The New York Times Magazine where she leads the creative team responsible for the design and art direction of The Magazine and its supplements. She and her team have won numerous awards for their print and interactive design from organizations including the Art Directors Club, the Society of Publication Designers, D&AD, the American Institute for Graphic Arts, the Type Directors Club and Creative Review, among others. Gail has taught and lectured internationally. She is a member of AGI and a former board member of the SPD.

In the last session we will see a selection of books designed by Irma Boom, one of the most renowned graphic designers of the moment. We will be able to take a journey from her first designs in the 1980s to recent examples, taking as a guiding thread the third edition of the retrospective miniature catalogue that she herself periodically updates.

Irma Boom’s work is a tribute to the history and present day of the book, a celebration of its powerful presence as an object and a testimony to its survival in times of electronic publications.

The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.

Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund.

Is it better than a Tree?

Design books in 2023

High on Type is a collective of five calligraphers, artists and/or designers. Writing is the basis for everything they do. Whether they are organising a festival, doing a residency, creating an exhibition or giving a lecture. In this lecture, which Ivo and Guido will be giving, they will show why it is so important to keep playing in a making process, using mainly two major recent projects.  

Guido de Boer, born 1988 is an independent visual artist with a background as designer. His work consists of images that you can read and texts that you can expe- rience visually. His work is large, monumental and handmade and therefore expressive, but also co- mes across as graphic. In addition to his artistic practice, Guido is a teacher at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. 

Ivo Brouwer, born 1992 is a type and graphic artist based in The Hague. His work compiles of experimental type and graphic pat- terns made by translating tactile methods to digital environments and the other way around. He holds a Master‘s degree in Type Design from KABK Royal Academy of Arts The Hague. In 2022, he received a fund for Talent Development by the Creative Industries Fund NL. 

In this session we will focus on the figure of Joost Grootens, a Dutch graphic designer specialising in the design of books on architecture, urban planning and art. His work is characterised by the handling of large amounts of information in the form of statistical data, maps and diagrams. His ability to visualise data has made him a benchmark in the field of visual communication. 

Taking as a starting point a retrospective book of his own work entitled “I swear I use no art at all”, we can get to know his design philosophy and some notable examples of his editorial production.

The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.

Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund.

Letters can be drawn in so many different ways. Cyrus Highsmith’s approach is based heavily on the importance of white space and sensitivity to shapes. It’s a method he applies to type design as well as image making of all kinds. For Highsmith, it’s a way of seeing the world. This workshop will be a messy, hands-on, and computer-free exploration of drawing, making, and thinking about letters.

Cyrus Highsmith is a letter drawer, teacher, author, and graphic artist. He teaches type design at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

He wrote and illustrated the acclaimed primer Inside Paragraphs: Typographic Fundamentals.

In 2015, he received the Gerrit Noordzij Prize for extraordinary contributions to the fields of type design, typography, and type education.

In 2017, he became Creative Director for Latin Type Development at Morisawa USA.
He goes to bed very early.