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CBS Sunday Morning News: Magniﬁca!

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:45:44 -0400

As we wrap up a trade edition of Botanica Magnifica, a unique book of flower portraiture, we are happy to share an exciting TV appearance of the photographer Jonathan Singer on a feature episode of CBS Sunday Morning News.
We appreciate the glowing review, as well as the comparisons to Audubon’s Birds of America.  Our edition contains the same images as the limited-edition Double Elephant folio housed at the Smithsonian Institution, but is different in several respects.
First, the trim size. You will not need a hand truck to transport this volume from the flat files to the podium. At 12 x 15" it stands a reasonable chance of fitting on your bookshelf. By the way, our edition includes five gatefold images for every chapter opener that approach in size the images in the Double Elephant.
Second, our book is scientifically reorganized and accompanied by explanatory essays and captions authored by two leading American botanists: W. John Kress, a Curator of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History and Marc Hachadourian, the Acting Manager of the Nolen Greenhouses for the New York Botanical Garden.
Third, the binding. Our trade edition is not as unique as the Double Elephant, which is hand-bound into colorful goatskin by a master craftsman. However it is much more practical and requires less care, being bound as a single volume (as opposed to original five) into durable Japanese Saifu cloth, and wrapped into an attractive dust jacket with French folds. We will also offer a deluxe edition with a slipcase that will further protect your very own copy.
Fourth, our book is more unique than the limited edition, in respect to the type in which the text is set. The text is set in Rilke, a new typeface designed by Jerry Kelly, a renowned book designer and calligrapher. This graceful and delicate Transitional face has only been licensed to about a dozen people in the world so far. We were proud to be the first to use it in a commercially-produced book when the font became available. We are happy for this new opportunity to make our edition of Botanica truly unique. Mr. Kelly has also contributed custom calligraphy for the title page and the cover of Botanica Magnifica that beautifully harmonizes with his own text typeface. May we also mention a competent layout?

Last, but not least, is the retail price. At $135.00 pre-publication special price (and even $185.00) you don’t have to be a billionaire to afford the $2.5 million price tag of the Double Elephant. Of course, if you happen to be a billionaire, the investment in something of a lasting value like the limited edition of this book may be a wiser decision than investing in the current stock market. The choice is yours.
Botanica Magnifica has also been featured on ABC, in Vanity Fair, ArtNews, Washington Post, and Fine Books, among others. Please visit Jonathan Singer’s website, http://botanicamagnifica.com/ for more information.

Of Tea & Guerilla Marketing

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:45:43 -0400

My cover for The Tea Drinker’s Handbook just starred in the most recent and the most outrageous installment of Abbeville’s marketing miniseries. Here is the scoop of the design process.

In a recent review of The Tea Drinker’s Handbook on the T Ching blog, reviewer Sandy M. Bushberg commented on the book’s handsome design: “One of the first things I noticed upon removing the book from its packaging was the distinct look and feel of it. It is immediately distinguishable by its unique shape and cover design. The book’s dimensions are 11.25″ by 6.5″, giving it a long, elegant look. And its simple matte pale yellow color with glossy highlights grabs your attention. You can see and feel the quality that went into producing this book.”
How do you get the general idea of “tea” across? Setting aside such overused designs as a Chinese-tea-packaging-laid-flat background and a teabag tag dangling about, we faced a conceptual challenge. Moreover, this book was co-published with a French publisher, which went for an all-type two-color treatment. We had to stick to the two-color rule but try to come up with something slightly more stimulating, so the project posed a production challenge as well.
One thing we knew we had to have in the design was tea leaves. We arranged some tea leaves used in the book into a neat line-art pile.

Then we looked through the book to find an iconic image of a teacup. Beautiful as it all was, there was no one image that said “tea” unequivocally to us. We needed art fast. So we brewed a strong cup of tea, set it on a windowsill, and took some photographs. We liked a foreshortened view from above, which showed the cup in an abstracted way.

Thanks to the brave new digital world we are living in, the image was instantly uploaded to the computer, retouched, and turned into a black-and-white piece of art.

Next we looked for two spot inks that would mix to produce that unmistakable “tea” hue. They ended up being a burgundy and a yellow. We were allowed to use spot varnish over the matte lamination, so we used it to highlight the tea in the cup and the type. It actually started to look like liquid! For a title font we chose Robert Slimbach’s elegant Caflisch Script for the affinity of some of its characters with the tea leaves. Lastly, we combined the ingredients, infused them with hot water, and let them steep. Some stylized steam ensued. The disparate pieces fell together in a way that we thought an ancient Chinese ink painter might have arranged. Finished! A coworker walked by and, glancing at the image, commented: “Is that beer?”

Oscar Gets a Facelift

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 11:28:01 -0500

We understand that in Hollywood these days it’s a common practice, if not a point of pride, to take the sting out of aging with a little cosmetic surgery. This year the trend was even taken up by the most familiar face in show business: Oscar himself, who turned 80 years old just last year. He declined to comment personally, but rumor has it he was quite satisfied with the procedure.
The cover of 80 Years of the Oscar: The Official History of the Academy Awards, by Robert Osborne, just had to feature our favorite Hollywood character. At the start of the design process, the Academy sent us it's new publicity shot of the statuette by Albert Watson, which we dutifully placed on the cover and surrounded with spotlights.

The Academy rejected this design, however, as “dull,” citing as an alternative model an earlier edition of the book that featured a red curtain backdrop and large type.

We went back to the drawing board and drew a red curtain. After knocking on a few Academy doors and begging a little, we managed to procure a few more views of our hero, including a side view and—our prize trophy, so to speak—a back view, affectionately titled “Butt Shot.” What we wanted to convey was that our book chronicles the history of the Oscars from every possible angle. We raised the red curtain just enough to reveal the close-up frontal view of the bust on the front, the full-height profile on the spine, and the rear view on the back. Now our readers will enjoy, along with the exhilarating sight of Oscar in three dimensions, a privileged glimpse of his back side, previously reserved for Oscar winners only.

The academy loved the new design, but for one problem: something in Oscar's face bothered them. As they examined his countenance up close on the front cover, they found the way his eye appeared on their own publicity image sinister. We were asked to perform a minor plastic surgery. We sharpened our scalpels and got to work.

We presented the Academy with three alternate treatments of the eye, but they opted for removal of the irritating organ altogether. We were also asked to clean up the chin and the nose to help our hero to appear younger, which we obliged.

We now had our design, but how could we print it in a way that did justice to our hero? We always had a feeling that a large part of what makes Oscar so popular in Hollywood is his shiny gold complexion, which the conventional CMYK process printing simply fails to convey. We’ve experimented with metallic inks in the past, but the results were unsatisfactory. In our search for gold, we stumbled upon a candy wrapper.

A holiday gift package of Ghirardelli chocolates, totaling an impressive 0.75 oz, was brought into the office and consumed in the blink of an eye. All that was left was a bit of gloriously overdone packaging. This wonder of salesmanship was printed in seven inks (CMYK process, plus opaque white, plus spot brown and blue), with embossing, die-cutting, adhesion, and folding. We estimated the production of one of these packages to cost around $1, whereas the candy inside could not be worth more than a nickel. Be that as it may, one aspect of the wrapper struck our fancy: the gold! Realistic, shiny, much-coveted color of the background! Upon some ungluing and scraping we discovered that the wrapper consisted of thick paper stock laminated with silver foil. The four-color image of the chocolates was printed on the opaque white to prevent the candy from looking metallic. The gold was actually a screen of yellow ink over the image—exactly what we needed for our friend Oscar.
We found a printer (Brady Palmer in upstate New York) that used to do packaging but now specialized in printing book jackets on foil-coated papers. They helped us follow our idea through to execution. We masked most of our cover with white, leaving the foil exposed for the jacket photographs and front cover type (with the exception of the word "Oscar," which we printed in white to make it visible even in poor lighting conditions).

The four-color halftones of the statuette were printed on the silver foil, producing that wonderful golden glow we so desired.

Knowing how rare it is in trade publishing today to see a jacket design that accords with the interior design, we were not going to miss this opportunity. We carried the red curtain motif through to the front matter pages on the interior, like so:

and like so:

The end! Oscar was so proud. And why shouldn’t he be? Name us one other man in Hollywood still confident enough to appear in the nude at the age of 80.

My Oscar Cover on Good Morning America

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:28:43 -0500

Robert Osborne, the author of 80 Years of the Oscar, was interviewed on Good Morning America this morning. My cover design was the biggest thing on the TV screen. Nice.

Most Beautiful Book

Sun, 6 Jan 2008 20:18:59 -0500

It does not happen every year that one’s work is recognized as the best of anything. Recently Barnes & Noble featured my book The History of Venice in Painting as just that: The Most Beautiful Book of the Year. I don’t know who nominated it and how many runners-up there were, but I have to admit, it feels good. See the same page for a favorable review of another book I designed, Courbet.