Maciej Markowicz Photographer's book
The brief
The book, Ph Collection and Other Works, documents photographer come furniture designer Maciej Markowicz's latest work. Maciej wanted the book to ‘hold its own space’ and connect with his existing brand. This included brand colours orange, grey and black, lower case used throughout.
The process
I am a great believer that design is a collaborative process, and working with a photographer and furniture designer was an exciting opportunity to really push the design of his book.
I learnt that Maciej is inspired by Max Bill and Bruno Munari, with his work being driven by the exploration of light, contrasting materials and textures.
With this in mind, I proposed a design combining the tactility and texture in his photography with the spatial dynamism of his furniture design. Combining different folds and different paper stocks throughout the book allowed his larger projects to develop and tell their own story with each turn of the page, while maintaining balance throughout by varying the density of images and details.
Together we determined the layout of the projects, and created a basic layout using a flat plan. From this I worked up a few layout ideas and designed the rest of the book.
It's all in the detail
For the folds, we kicked around a few different layout options before choosing the three used, and the projects that would benefit from the different configurations and reveals.
Maciej wanted the parallelogram to be integrated throughout, so this was used as a framing device, as well as the foundation for a geometric grid structure and printed texture elements to pull projects together.
Each project title page was printed on 110gsm Translucent Vellum Tracing Paper to introduce texture and depth into the book, giving each project a preview before turning the page.
Conclusions
This was one of those dream projects where the client was very happy to push the print and production budget to incorporate the extra folds and finishes. We compromised on a few of the ideas, specifically in binding techniques. The overall finish was exquisite.