n°49 — A Site: The Palace of Typographic Masonry. Author Thierry Chancogne

December 2024

“Dear Richard Niessen, how can I express my admiration for your work in general and for your project of the Palace of Typographic Masonry in particular? Perhaps by sharing my first impressions with you from when I discovered this place for animation, diffusion, and support for graphic art, graphic design, and typography. In this imaginary palace of ‘the splendor and variety of graphic languages’ that one can encounter on the internet, but also in publications, books, posters, meetings, art installations, and exhibitions, there is a dreamlike treasure trove of graphic objects from all places and all times: ritualistic symbols, game boards, alphabets, banknotes… And like Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, I am sure that, since my last visit, the layout of the place and the makeup of its collections have changed again…”

n°02 — A technical platform: Colorlibrary.ch by Maximage. Author: Manon Bruet

Sold Out
Author: Manon Bruet
12 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, black and cyan + 1 A2 poster, 3 PMS
+ 1 A2 poster, CMYK (reserved for subscribers) (sold out)
8th November 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062

The Workflow research project, run by Tatiana Rhis, Guy Meldem, and Julien Tavelli and David Keshavjee (Maximage) at the Écal, is interested in current technologies of the printed object. It consists of a series of experiences that attempt to circumvent currently available production technologies, provoking coincidences and accidents with the goal of obtaining new outcomes.

More than simply questioning the possible circumvention of tools, Workflow explores technicality, modes of functioning, and flaws. In this way, the programme pursues the field of experimentation opened up by the Swiss studio Maximage since 2008. In the context of their degree project at the Écal, Julien Tavelli and David Keshavjee already combined manual and digital techniques so as to develop their own production tools, and notably their own printing methods. From their experiments have emerged, among other things, the Programme typeface, and the Les impressions magiques publication, that appears today as a manifest object of their approach.

One of the first results of the Workflow programme has been the creation of a series of colorimetric profiles that allows the conversion of digital images for printing with one, two, three, four, or five accompanying colors, whether they are basic (CMYK), pastels, fluorescent, or metallic.

The work on these profiles has two aims. It serves to increase the awareness of students at the Écal with regard to the management and theory of color, but it also allows, for the first time, the automation of operations and settings that have until now been done on a case-by-case basis through the manual use of image-editing software and CAD.

Advocating an “innovative” and “professional” solution for the treatment of color, the Écal and the Workflow programme launched the website colorlibrary.ch in 2016 and offered the profiles for sale. The platform appears as an online library that presents a large variety of profiles with different colorful combinations. The different profiles are displayed on screen, applied to images by Iranian photographer Shirana Shahbazi; they seem to replay the codes of Photoshop type images–from the butterfly to the eye, the still life to the waterfall.

Beginning with an analysis of the structure of this platform, the aesthetic and terminological languages that it summons, and their limits, we will open a number of fields of investigation, more widely linked to the question of the tools and modes of production of images.

n°03 — A monograph: Recollected Work by Mevis & van Deursen. Author: Étienne Hervy

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Author: Étienne Hervy.
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
22th November 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062

In 2006, the publisher Artimo entrusted Linda van Deursen and Armand Mevis with the editorial direction and the Graphic Design of their own monograph, Recollected Works. Joined by Paul Elliman in writing the texts, the two Graphic Designers responded with an approach similar to that which they adopt when they accompany other artists and photographers in the creation of books whose relevance has largely contributed to the studio’s reputation. Mevis and van Deursen propose to the reader to experience their work in operation, rather than simply contenting themselves with the reproduction of the work presented as artworks in themselves. Rather than the nostalgia for a more or less formalized organization of their previous projects, the two Graphic Designers look at their previous work as the material for an autonomous project from which this book will emerge.

Such a choice directly raises the question of the constitution and transmission of a culture inherent to Graphic Design, whether it isspecifically aimed at designers or else at a much wider audience. How to transmit the issues and points of quality of a discipline itself dedicated to transmission? One must above all recognize the capacity of this eminently visual field to confront appearances.

Our study of this work will obviously reference a corpus of monographs and publications made by Graphic Designers (Christophe Jacquet, Joost Grootens, M/M (Paris), Karel Martens, Experimental Jetset, Wolgang Weingart, etc.) while at the same time looking more widely at the forms currently adopted for the transmission of Graphic Design (exhibitions, conferences, etc.). Beyond the issues discussed and the questions raised by Recollected Works, it is a matter of both pulling on the thread of the work of Mevis and van Deursen (does a continuity exist between the editorial design of Why Mister, Why? for Geert van Kesteren or the Library Of The Museum Museum of Contemporary African Art for Meschac Gaba, and the identity of the Stedelijk Museum?) and questioning the pertinence of a discourse specific to Graphic Design.

n°21 — An original: The Most Beautiful Swiss books 2004–2006. Authors: James Langdon, Laurent Benner & Adrian Samson

Interview with Laurent Benner by James Langdon
Photos: Adrian Samson
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
25th March 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-16-8
ISSN: 2558-2062

The awards programme The Most Beautiful Swiss Books has been organised almost without interruption by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture since 1943. A book design award with such history, particularly in a book-making culture as rich as Switzerland’s, offers insightful perspectives on Graphic Design for publishing, the culture that commissions and values it, and the critical discourse that surrounds it.

Each year the awarded books are documented in a substantial catalogue, made by one of the graphic designers awarded in previous years. The inherently self-reflexive tendencies of such catalogues—books about books, Graphic Design in the context of Graphic Design—present stimulating yet rather fraught conditions for graphic designers to work in. Looking back over the catalogues produced during the last two decades, a conversation-through-practice is clearly legible. After a conceptually sophisticated catalogue or series (often designers have been commissioned for series of two or three catalogues) follows a simple visual document. After a modest, finely-crafted production comes something more lavish or experimental.

The 2004–2006 catalogues were conceived by Laurent Benner, a Swiss designer working in London, and designed with English designer Jonathan Hares. Laurent’s proposition for the 2004 catalogue was audacious. He contacted the printers of each of the 20 awarded books from that year and asked them to reprint a section of their book. These reprinted sections were then transported to a single Swiss bookbinder and bound, with some additional pages of front- and back-matter, to comprise the catalogue.