Design To Tell

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

Who are you?

We are Roni & Roni—Roni Schneider and Roni Ben Yosef—best friends since our first year at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, and collaborators for the past nine years.

Our story began in one of the very first classes at Shenkar. During a critique session, a conversation about Israeli art developed, and our lecturer, Reuven Cohen, noticed how deeply engaged we both were with the subject. He suggested we become friends. That day, right after the class, we sat down together and began a conversation that seems to be continuing to this day.

Sometime after graduating, we decided to try working together and starting our own studio. We spoke with anyone who could help us secure projects—friends, family—in order to land our first job. At first, we didn't get any book projects. But after designing and producing our first book, we enjoyed the process so much that we steered ourselves toward more and more printed projects.

Tell us about a project that led you to unexpected places.

Micha Ullman: First Watch—a catalogue for an exhibition presented at the Negev Museum of Art in 2024, curated by Ron Bartos.

While working on the exhibition and the book, we created a unique letterform for the exhibition title, inspired by Ullman’s drawings from the period of his military service—drawings of bunkers, concrete barriers, and military structures. We often design custom typefaces for books, exhibitions, and other projects, but we had never designed a complete font.

Following inquiries from colleagues who were curious and kept asking about the typeface, we decided to challenge ourselves and develop the letters into a full font. The experience taught us a great deal about typography and type design—and we are still working on it with the goal of expanding it to include Latin characters as well.

What is the book that challenged you the most to design, and why?

We are currently working on the book How Do You Actually Teach Design?—a volume that brings together 120 design exercises by lecturers from all the design departments in academies across Israel, from the 1980s to the present. The book is edited by Meirav Shemi Peretz and published by Poraz et Navok (Yoni Raz Portugali and the artist Hila Toony Navok).

This book challenges us for several reasons. The first is that we are genuinely excited about it. It’s a bit like having a crush on someone and making an extra effort so that everything turns out just right. It’s complex, because we don’t want the design to feel strained or “overworked”—we mainly want the book to remain readable and functional.

The second reason relates to the scope and diversity of the content. We invested a lot of work in the grid to ensure accessibility and clarity, searching for the ideal balance that would address the differences between the briefs: varying writing styles, different lengths, and diverse types of notes.

And finally, there's the subject itself—design. This is a question we grapple with quite often: how does one design for design? Here, the challenge feels even greater for us, compared to projects that originate in content worlds more distant from our own.

Dream book: a paginated object that you haven’t designed yet but would very much like to?

It would be amazing to create an anthology on Israeli cinema.

A book recommendation that you didn’t design?

Eventually We’ll Die | Young Art in Israel of the 90s, designed by Michal Sahar. The book was published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008, one of six exhibitions that surveyed six decades of Israeli art across major museums throughout the country.

This is a book that has accompanied us since our student years and continues to do so today. It has always served as a kind of manual for us: a simple, elegant grid; well-proportioned font sizes; clear typographic hierarchies; generous compositional breathing space; and an iconic minimalist cover in pink and yellow. Most importantly, the artworks take center stage—not the design.

In addition, the catalogue surveys Israeli art of the 1990s, the decade in which we grew up and were first exposed to the art world. The book succeeds in capturing the spirit of the nineties and evoking that period. And that, in our view, is the purpose of a successful book: to preserve an atmosphere, a time, or an experience within a physical, paged object.

An inspirational book—from your own bookshelf?

Marginalia by Anja Lutz—a beautiful project by the German graphic designer, who conducted research into the grids of books she had designed. She stripped away all text and imagery, leaving only the grid markings, which she perforated from layers of cardboard in different colors. Sometimes she left them as they were; at other times she layered one sheet over another, so that the grids were revealed beneath each other through the perforated rectangles.

The result is a collage of layers, surfaces of abstract rectangles and squares that resemble an imaginary architectural blueprint seen from above. We were drawn to the idea of elevating the “backstage” of graphic design—the grid—and bringing it to the front as a work in its own right. Something is surprising about focusing particularly on what is usually invisible: the transparent structures, the negative spaces, the rhythm and distribution of lines within different compositions.

What would you recommend to a creator at the beginning of the book-making process?

To cultivate curiosity toward the new world opening up before you. One of the things we love most about our work is the exposure to other realms of knowledge—and it can be absolutely anything. We find ourselves reading about Jewish ritual practices, about mushrooms and beehives from the world of botany, learning about promissory notes and shares from economics, and discovering new art and forgotten artists we likely would never have encountered otherwise.

It’s important to use the associations that arise from the encounter with the content, and not rely solely on rational decisions. The best thing that can happen is that, in the end, the design surprises even us—and that’s how we know we’ve truly surrendered to the process.

How do you choose or create a typeface for a paginated project?

We like to vary our approach. Sometimes we feel like working with a particular typeface, and then we test how well it fits the project. Other times, we design a logotype first, and only afterward select typefaces that will support it effectively. We go through many trials before settling on the fonts that will accompany the book. We try to listen more to intuition and avoid being too rigid about what is “right” or “wrong.” It’s a bit like spotting a beautiful shirt in a store, trying it on, and realizing it doesn’t quite suit you. The same goes for testing typefaces: you can’t really know until you place the font alongside the images and texts and feel the “click.”

How do you approach material choices for a paginated project?

Something happens when we begin working on a new project—we start seeing it everywhere. Suddenly, we notice or touch something that reminds us of it: a torn sticker, peeling wood, a glossy jacket with a lining in a contrasting color and texture, or even the proportions of a building. All of these become great springboards for imagining how we would like the object to look and feel by the end of the process.

In reality, every project has budget constraints, and then comes another stage that is no less creative—realizing and refining the vision within those limitations. Sometimes it is precisely within those constraints that we arrive at the simplest and most inventive solutions.

An international designer/store/publisher we must know about!?

A publishing house we recommend is the Folio Society, which we discovered through a special edition they released of the legendary Dune by Frank Herbert—which, of course, we bought. All the publisher’s books are illustrated editions of literary classics from various genres: fantasy, science fiction, children’s tales, folk stories, and Greek mythology. The Folio Society gives immense respect to illustration and design, celebrating the traditional world of books: hardcover bindings with foils and embossing, special endpapers, cloth bookmarks, jackets, and rigid boxes. It’s a reading experience that takes you back to childhood—lying on the bed with a giant book, drawn into a magical, imaginary world.

Tell us about an interesting project you’re currently working on.

An exhibition and catalogue for the Edmond de Rothschild Award for Industrial Design 2025. This is already the second time we’ve had the opportunity to work on the award catalogue. The first time was in 2022, when we designed the catalogue for the award in textile, fashion, and jewelry design. What’s most exciting about this project is the client’s request that it not be just another standard catalogue, but a unique, flip-through object. It's also a chance to be exposed to other design worlds and to get to know the country’s best designers in these fields up close.

Who would you like to invite to Design To Tell?

Michal Sahar.