Season 1, 1st to 15th issue
Issues 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 & 15
15 × 20 pages and sometimes more
21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK and sometimes more, Saddle stitched binding
Design: Syndicat
2017-2018
7€ per issue or 90€ the subscription
n°30 — Types of types: the typographic specimen by Lineto. Author: Olivier Lebrun
For Lineto (https://lineto.com) the Specimen plays out through forms and formats in order to promote the foundry’s typefaces: books, posters, envelopes, pamphlets, letter transfers, print ads, and video clips as well as inflatable structures and bootlegs of logotypes. When Reala published LL Biff in 2000, the specimen employed graffiti culture and its modes of distribution, along with a combination of two references: “Medium is the message”*, “Style is the message”**. For Lineto the citation is a form that allows them to distribute their typographic catalogue while promoting diverse cultural fields: “Ignorance of your own culture is not considered cool!”***
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
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°02 — A technical platform: Colorlibrary.ch by Maximage. Author: Manon Bruet
Sold out — Only available with season 1 subscription
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
Sold out — Only available with season 1 subscription
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.
