n°51 — Lawrence Weiner: We Are Ships at Sea, Not Ducks On a Pond. Author: Joris Kritis with interviews with Nora Turato & Linda van Deursen

February 2025

Lawrence Weiner’s use of graphic design has always been of fascination for graphic designers. ‘What makes Weiner’s work seductive to graphic designers is his resolutely non-apologetic method of displaying words without need for any explanation.’* But in this text a comparative analysis is made of different voices about Weiner’s use of graphics & typography.

Next to a speculative history of Weiner’s formal language, two interviews—with graphic designer Linda Van Deursen and artist Nora Turato—pay attention to Weiner’s enduring legacy.

*— Russel Holmes, “The Work Must Be Read”, Eye Magazine, Autumn, 1998, https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-work-must-be-read.

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°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.

n°25 — Exhibition views? Jonathan Monk. Author: Remi Parcollet

Author: Remi Parcollet

20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
24th October 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-17-5
ISSN: 2558-2062

Author: Remi Parcollet

20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
24th October 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-17-5
ISSN: 2558-2062

Photographs of works of art in an exhibition or studio setting, enlarged to the size of the wall, have become an essential and increasingly systematic element of contemporary museography. The institutional curator accompanied by his or her set designer, and the independent curator, both use them as much to recontextualize works as for their aesthetic qualities as documentary images that have become immersive and reflexive.

The obviously richer relationship that artists have with these unique images reveals in various ways what is currently at stake in the act of exhibiting.

To create a kind of retrospective of his work, in 2016 Johnathan Monk debuted a series of exhibitions entitled Exhibit Model*, which consisted of covering the walls of the exhibition space with archive photographs that documented his work in different contexts over the last 20 years. Marie J. Jean considers these staged exhibition views as a form of augmented reality: “This manner of considering the exhibition, in other words, of exhibiting the work along with the context of its appearance, reminds us that the work of art “is a place”, “establishes a place”, is “a has taken place**”.

However for Johnathan Monk, who often uses the work of other artists, isn’t it simply a way in which to appropriate his own work?”

* — Kunsthaus Baselland and Galerie Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen in 2016, VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal in 2017, KINDL, Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin in 2019.

** — Marie J. Jean. Autour de Jonathan Monk. Les vues d’expositions comme réalité augmentée. Ciel variable, issue 109, Spring 2018, p. 56–65

Jonathan Monk, «Exhibit Model Four», 2019 Kindl, Berlin. Photographie: Jens Ziehe. A1 format poster printed in CMYK on blue back paper

10,00€ —

unlimited edition

30,00€ —