By The Book: Design To Tell

The section By The Book: 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 Keren and Golan, and we have been working together since 2005. We are also a couple and parents to two daughters. We both graduated with a B.Des., with honors, from the Department of Visual Communication, Faculty of Design, Holon Institute of Technology (HIT). Golan teaches at HIT and Keren teaches at Shenkar. We design mainly books and catalogues and deal with typographic design for exhibitions in various museums. The studio also handles private graphic design projects.

How did you get into the world of design, and book design specifically?

During our studies, we fell in love with the print format and the ability to tell a story through the experience of turning pages. After graduating, we worked in design studios and after a year or so, we knew that we wanted to work together and strike out on our own. We slowly began to focus on the areas of art, education, culture and culinary arts.

What was your most challenging book design project and why?

The catalogue Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed, for the exhibition by Dr. Ayelet Zohar at the University Gallery, at Tel Aviv University. It was a trilingual catalogue: Hebrew, English, and Japanese. The complexity of the meeting of the languages and the amount of texts were a challenge that took a while to figure out.

A project that led you to unexpected places?

In 2007, we started the art and design magazine A5 (today in collaboration with the designer Tali Green). A5 was and still is a side project of the studio. We see it as a platform for presenting a printed themed exhibition in every issue. After 17 issues, we have learned a lot in terms of curation, production, and marketing. A5 introduced us to many creators, and opened the door to interesting projects, collaborations and exhibitions in Israel and abroad. There were many surprises with it along the way, and it continues to reach new audiences beyond the community of artists and designers.

Your dream book: an object that can be leafed-through that you have not designed and would really like to?

A big dream is to design a book that is entirely a soundtrack (existing or imagined) – a kind of experimental meeting between visual communication and music. An abstract journey using visual means that translates the hearing experience or the opposite—that can be read as sound.

Recommendation of a book that you did not design?

Michael Gordon: Imprints, about the work of book design, is fascinating and designed to perfection. We also really love the book First We Feel Then We Fall, designed by Avigail Reiner and Avihai Mizrahi for the artist Guy Yanai, a cleverly edited, excellent artist’s book.

An inspiring book from your bookshelf?

The German magazine Rosebud (discontinued) was an independent magazine, all of 8 issues, which broke every convention known: changing format, a different look with every issue, a fascinating celebration of concept, content, look, and production.

How do you choose/create a font/font family for book (leafing) project?

Fonts are a tool for conveying a message and a mirror of the content. Every font we choose or design carries emotion, culture, associations, the period… just as the book’s design is from a place of understanding the content and having a close connection to it, selecting a font is inseparable from that.

How do you approach the selection of materials for a book (leafing) project?

Following up on the previous answer, also the feel of the paper is an essential part of the process, also the inside paper and the cover. All these need to fit the content we are working with. In this regard, budget also plays a role—we usually start from the big fantasy and the challenge is to maximize the possibilities given the existing budget.

A designer / store / publisher abroad that we can’t miss!

Magculture in London – a veritable paradise for independent magazine lovers.

Éditions Déesse in Paris – a comics bookstore that’s hard to leave.

An interesting project that you are currently working on.

We are starting work on a book presenting an intriguing study on the encounter between food and prisoners in Israeli prisons. The book will include several genres of texts and photographs taken in Israeli prisons - a glimpse into the lives of prisoners in a culinary context.

Wow. Which designer should we invite next to “By the Book”?

Nadav Shalev.