For Print Only

A Division of UnderConsideration

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2009
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2017

This book for Kunstenaars, Cultuur en Ondernemerschap (Artists, Culture and Entrepreneurship), a Dutch non-profit organisation that stimulates and supports artists in raising their levels of professionalism and developing new areas of work, focuses on an exhibition of the works produced at a workshop about exhibit design. The exhibit and the book had an unusual inspiration, as the book’s designer, Gerben Dollen, explains:

The curators of this exhibition based their concept on the work and thoughts of David Byrne. For this reason the design of the publication had also to be built upon this; this article [PDF] was a great help.

And on his design intentions, he offers:

The show was held in a property located in the red light district of Amsterdam; I took that element as a starting point and turned it the other way round by putting a green light (red’s opposite) into the book’s spine.

In the book images of the exposed art works are covered with a silver scratch-off ink layer, and, on top of that a text layer is printed. So the end user has to make an irrevocable choice: stay with the informal text about the artwork or scratch it off for an image of the art work itself. In addition it’s a collaboration between the designer, photographer and end-user of the booklet. And because David Byrne plays a Fender guitar, including Fender guitar picks would sure be best as it links both to the scratch-off layers as it does to Mr. Byrne.

The book also uses Gerben’s own Actium [PDF] typeface, which paired with the simple layouts and awesomely fluorescent green makes this a truly energetic and contemporary publication. The scratch-off layers are indeed too nice and well laid out to encourage scratching off, but you are rewarded by very nicely photographed projects. Another aspect I really liked about this was the title, “Zonder Wrijving Geen Glans,” a Dutch saying that very roughly translates to “Without Polishing there is no Gloss.” A nice bit of life advice, if you ask me. Oh, and the Fender pick? It’s nice and pearly.

The green gradient in the spine seems easy to print well but actually it was difficult to print stepless. The experts at Calff & Meischke kindly printed a couple of samples on press in order to get that effect right and perfect.

The silver scratch off surfaces turned out to damage too easily during the mechanized production process, so in the end all booklets had to be fold and bounded by hand to leave it intact for the end-users/readers.

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TRAX Type Specimen

Zonder Wrijving Geen Glans Book

Production Method

Offset

Silkscreen

Design

Design: Type Mafia (Gerben Dollen)
Photography: Isolde Woudstra
Editor: Inge van der Ven

Printing

Offset: Calff & Meischke
Silk Screen: SilkScreen Holland BV