Book Design

Artist: Isabell Heimerdinger
Title: Four Films & True Stories
Year: 2008
Publisher: JRP | Ringier, Zurich
Edited by Isabell Heimerdinger, Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié
Essays by Frédéric Paul, Raymar Stange
Text in English
Size: 23 x 16.5 cm [9 x 6 1/2 in.]
Number of pages: 104
Printing: Offset (4-color process, 4-color process + 1 spot color)
Binding: Hardbound
Cover: Silk screened black paper cloth + offset printed stickers

Designed in collaboration with Jean-Marie Courant / Regular

The design and organization of this book came out of discussion with the artist who spoke of her work as taking on a new direction and being divided between filmmaking and installations in exhibition spaces. So it seemed to make sense to propose that the two parts of her work be separated, with one part presenting the work in the layout of a magazine on cinema, and the other, taking the form of an exhibition catalog. From this, the artist came up with the idea to ask one author to write a film review and another to write a catalog essay on the basis of the order in which pictures of Heimerdinger's works were laid out in the book. The titles of Frédéric Paul and Raymar Stange's texts provided the title of the book. Instead of doing two different designs myself, I thought it would be more interesting to ask another designer to design the exhibition catalog part. Jean-Marie Courant's shared interest in a conceptual approach to book design made this collaboration possible. We decided on a format and that I would use Times and Jean-Marie Helvetica, and we went about designing the two parts completely separately. The cover came out of much discussion between the two of us. The fact that stickers are stuck on and that their color combinations are variable are a reflection of the separate parts of the book.