Design To Tell

The section Design To Tell invites book designers to share their process of creating art books and catalogs. Each designer invites the next colleague to the magazine.

Who are you?

We are Zohar Koren and Idan Am-Shalem, graphic designers and co-founders of Field Day Studio, which currently operates in Tel Aviv and Amsterdam. The Studio specializes in graphic design and art direction in the field of art and culture, as well as branding in the lifestyle and leisure sectors. Idan lives in Ramat Gan, and Zohar has been living in Amsterdam for the past year. We are both graduates of the Visual Communication Department at Shenkar, and have been teaching branding, typography, and experimental design courses at Shenkar and Bezalel. Field Day is based in Tel Aviv and there are six more wonderful members on our team.

How did you each come to design—and specifically book design?
Each of us has a slightly different story:

Zohar:
I wasn’t one of those kids drawing all the time, and I didn’t go through any kind of art track at school. But I had a deep love for music, which came with an obsession for CDs, magazines, music videos, posters—any kind of visual or promotional material connected to the musicians I was fascinated by.

At 21, someone casually asked me what I wanted to study. I said probably something general, like business. The friend asked, “But what would you really want to do if you could do anything in the world?” I said: “Something involving the visual material around music.” And he said: “Oh, so you want to be a graphic designer.” And that’s when the path started to form. It took a few years to find my way.

Initially, I wasn’t accepted into the programs I applied to, so I began studying in a multidisciplinary design program at Kibbutzim College. During my first semester, I realized that typography fascinated me more than anything else, and I knew I wanted to dive deeper. I applied to Shenkar again, was accepted, and began studying there in 2009. I came in with a relatively narrow worldview regarding the range of fields connected to visual communication, and in my first year, I still thought I’d finish my studies and work at an advertising agency. In the first two years of my studies, I was exposed to the world of print, while also working at the ColorTouch print house—where Idan and I first met. I gained practical, hands-on tools, and there was something about the tension in creating a narrative through a sequence of pages that captivated me. I was deeply influenced by the instructors and courses in the department, and for the first time, I felt I had found my place.

Idan:
I was really drawn to the idea of smooth symbols made on the computer, with solid color and sharp finish (in retrospect, I realize this was an attraction to print and vector-based elements). That’s how I found myself making logos and symbols in my school notebooks, trying to replicate the feel of print.

After the army, I moved to Brussels, where I became more consciously exposed to a culture that felt new and fascinating to me. I was inspired by street art—tagging, graffiti, stickers—and by the general atmosphere of strangeness. I loved that street signs and empty walls in public spaces were full of graphic expressions in all sorts of styles—some clear, others enigmatic and encoded. I wanted to be part of that, and it became a world of content that fascinated me and led me to start engaging with it myself.

At the same time, I had a local friend who was studying at one of the design schools in Belgium (Saint-Luc). That’s how I got close to the field—through her, I went to a graduate exhibition, and it really deepened my interest. Other moments followed that gradually led me to understand that this was what I wanted to do.

Book design happened organically through my studies. The practical side of the program exposed me to working with the page-turning format—its physicality and the possibilities it offers drew me in, and I found myself making use of it in many projects.

What's the book that challenged you the most, and why?

One of the longest and most complex projects the studio has taken on was Hexagonal Lobes, Soft Teeth and Other Riddles by Shachar Freddy Kislev. It’s a riddle book accompanied by scientific illustrations, based on abstract descriptions of fruits and vegetables that Freddy invented and then sent to scientific illustrators around the world—without telling them what object was being described.

The project was developed on and off over the course of three years. It was a challenge to craft a typographic language that could converse with both botanical field guides and riddle books at once. Another layer of complexity was figuring out how to structure the riddle-solving process and the layout of the book in a way that would sustain interest and suspense across a multi-page format.

About a year and a half in, when the book was already fully laid out, we printed a sample copy—and Freddy wasn’t happy with the book’s size. At first, it was hard to accept that kind of feedback at such a late stage, but once we tested a smaller format, it became clear Freddy was right—the original dimensions didn’t match the reading experience or the physical feel such an object needed to evoke.

Changing the size meant redefining the grid and rebuilding the foundational layout structures—essentially a painstaking process of resetting the entire book. Another major challenge came during production: the book contained illustrations by about ten different artists, each of whom submitted their work in different scanned or photographed formats, with varying resolutions and image qualities.

We undertook a detailed prepress process—reviewing every single image, unifying all shades of black and resolution, cleaning up scanning marks, and standardizing the file formats. On the print day itself, after the first few sheets rolled out, we noticed that some of the scans had a 1% black background tone that became visible in print. We had to stop everything, reopen all the files, and go through each image again manually to ensure the black was completely removed. The issue was finally resolved only after Eli, the owner of A.R. Printing, suggested testing a less dense and sensitive screen frequency. Only on our third print day did we manage to print the book in full.

It's impossible to ignore the most talked-about catalog of the year: Mother Land by Ruth Patir. You worked on it at lightning speed, and it made headlines.

The catalog accompanied her multi-channel video installation at the 2024 Venice Biennale. It draws on documentary footage of her personal experiences undergoing fertility preservation treatments, interwoven with elements from the worlds of ancient archaeology and advanced imaging technologies.

The design of the catalog aimed to merge two central thematic realms: archaeology and historical artifacts on the one hand, and hyper-digital three-dimensional imagery on the other. We tried to address this challenge through the layout design, graphic processing, and material choices. The combination of natural and synthetic materials heightens the visual tension and creates the sensory browsing experience we aspired to.

Dream book: a printed object you haven't designed yet but would love to?

Zohar: I think both of us are really drawn to the aesthetics of indexes and visual archives. I’d love for a large-scale project like that to find its way to the studio.

Please recommend a book you didn't design?
Yael Bartana – And Europe Will Be Stunned, designed by Guy Saggee, and Jacques Katmor, designed by Kobi Levi.

What advice would you give to an artist who's just starting to make a book?

We believe the foremost element in the relationship between an artist and a designer is interpersonal chemistry—the ability to embark on a shared journey that’s open, unexpected, and collaborative. That kind of dialogue can generate the ideas that fit best—ones that go beyond simply presenting a portfolio of works, and instead transform the book into an artistic expression in its own right, capable of capturing the essence of the artist’s creations and folding them into a page-turning object that stands on its own, apart from the original works.

A book from your own shelf that inspires you.

The catalog series The Most Beautiful Swiss Books (Laurenz Brunner, MAXIMAGE, Hubertus Design, Aude Lehmann).

How do you choose or develop a typeface for a book project?

Our starting point for any typographic work is a deep understanding of the conceptual worlds the book seeks to express—where those references come from, and how the shape and structure of type can carry a visual embodiment of those themes. We look for a typographic language that resonates not only with the subject matter, but also with the reader’s experience of turning pages and moving through the book.

How do you approach the material choices for a printed book?

Many of the decisions regarding materials come from understanding the artist’s medium—the kinds of materials they choose to work with and how their ideas are presented through them. We believe that from that understanding, the right production choices begin to emerge intuitively. Often, the content itself points toward the materials it needs.

Any international publishers we should know?
Roma Publications, Amsterdam, Donlon Books, London, Spector Books, Leipzig, InOtherWords, London.

Tell us about an interesting project you're working on these days.
Efrat Klipstein’s book Downscaling of the Heart. It’s an artist’s book that revisits and reworks Klipstein’s existing pieces while also presenting them in new ways. The book moves between the logic of an atlas and the intimacy of a journal—balancing the personal and the universal, the rational and the emotional.

Which female designer would you like to pass the baton to?
Tali Liberman.