Cele mai frumoase carti din Romania participa, pentru prima oara in proiectul international »Best Book Design from all over the World« 2013, care consta intr-un concurs international de design de carte si 2 expozitii organizate de Stiftung Buchkunst la targurile internationale de la Leipzig si Frankfurt, intr-o editie care aniverseaza 50 de ani. Juriul a selectat un numar de 14 castigatori, insa niciuna dintre cartile romanesti nu se afla printre ele, in acest an.
Cartile castigatoare, cat si toate cartile concurente vor fi expuse in Best Book Design from all over the World / Schönste Bücher aus aller Welt în cadrul Târgului de Carte de la Leipzig, in perioada 14. – 17. Martie (Halle 3 Stand G600).
Vor fi prezentate 575 de carti din 32 de țări. In acest an, marele premiu a fost acordat cartii germane FALLEN – Gian-Philip Andreas, Gesine Palmer.
Cartea “Gasiti si pierduti. Found and lost”, un proiect al artistului roman Nicu Ilfoveanu a facut parte din finalistii concursului, fiind unul din cele 50 de titluri din lista finala a celor mai frumoase carti din lume. Nicu Ilfoveanu a fost unul dintre membrii juriului concursului national “Cele mai frumoase carti din Romania, 2012”, iar cartea sa a fost castigatoare a sectiunii de design de carte in cadrul Galei “Bun de Tipar”.
Award Winners »Schönste Bücher aus aller Welt« / »Best Book Design from all over the World« 2013
Jury panel in Leipzig, February 8th and 9th, German National Library
GOLDENE LETTER
Germany Gian-Philip Andreas, Gesine Palmer Fallen Publisher: Eigenverlag Hans-Jörg Pochmann, Leipzig Printer: Druckstudio Frankenstein GbR, Leipzig Bookbinding: Buchbindewerkstatt der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig Designer: Hans-Jörg Pochmann, Leipzig Producer: Karla Fiedler, Leipzig, Hans-Jörg Pochmann, Leipzig
A book with two front pages but no back one. Two stories – one in German, one in English – both to be read through to the end of the book. The homographic titles “Fallen” differ only in tense – the present in German, the perfect in English. And precisely this is what provides the book designer with the motif for a typographical performance of the content. Throughout the book the text is rotated within the type-area through 180 degrees, flush left ragged right remaining order of the day. You start reading on a right-hand page, leaf forward rotating the book a little bit more each time you turn the page until you end up on a left-hand page. By now the reader has just about stumbled through to the end of one of the stories with a slight sense of disorientation, only for the dizzying experience to be continued with the same rotational game for the other story – this time in the opposite direction.
GOLD MEDAL
The Netherlands Witho Worms Cette montagne, c’est moi Publisher: Fw: Books, Amsterdam Designer: Hans Gremmen Photographer: Witho Worms Printer: Mart. Spruijt, Amsterdam Bookbinder: Hexspoor, Boxtel ISBN: 9789490119140
What is the matter with these pictures? With contrasts as weak as these, the features of the landscape are only perceptible by paying special attention. The images show coal mounds, slag heaps of the mining industry, documented by the artist after near scientific site inspections in five European countries. This foray is translated into the paged medium by glued Japanese bookbinding, so that the images – printed in steel grey and black on black paper – continue to the next page across the folded leading edge. Gradually, the irritating contrasts take on a deeper meaning: just like the light-absorbing black of the coal, the book – contrary to conventional perceptions – becomes a light-absorbing gallery of photographs. The book elevates the mysterious photographic project into an inimitable object of meditation.
SILVER MEDAL
Taiwan Wang, Yen-Kai A Cachalot on a Train Publisher: Locus Publishing Company Limited Designer: NOBU Illustrator / Photographer: NOBU
What calmness and poetry emanates from this book! The compositional strategies of the depicted contemporary illustrations obey the primacy of flat space or spatial flatness stretching between linear drawn structures. The western differentiation between drawing and painting thus grasps at nothing, because in the Far East these non-painterly means acquire an absolute pictorial and magical effect. This authority is also expressed by the language of the text pages: the dominant white spaces are tickled by the filigree gossamer of the Chinese square-block characters. The poetry does not lie in vocalized or depicted items but in the aura of circumscription. This is the true delight offered by this book.
SILVER MEDAL
Japan Lu Xun The Words of Lu Xun Publisher: Heibonsha Limited Publishers, SDX Joint Publishing Company Designer: Kenya Hara / Tei Rei Printer: Tokyo Inshokan Printing Co., Ltd. Bookbinder: Oguchi Book Binding & Printing Co., Ltd ISBN: 978-4-582-48216-4
This bilingual anthology of quotations – Japanese and Chinese – has been designed to convey a tantalizing sense of pleasure to hand and eye. The small, sparingly distributed wood engravings with their generous black spaces provide a faint sense of the spirit of departure during the first decades of the 20th century. Lu Xun is regarded as a modernizer of Chinese literature. The design of the small ceremonial board-covered volume – the delicate sphere-like typography of hanging lines and the overall accoutrement – exudes a self-confident air of modesty. Red, the colour of good fortune, cloaks the soft pages in the endpaper, three-page edging, cover coating, dust cover and banderole. The booklet can be regarded as an homage to the author.
BRONZE MEDAL
Belgium Nathanaëlle Baës-Cantillon, Joachim Declerck, Michiel Dehaene, Sarah Levy Changing Cultures of Planning – Rotterdam, Zürich, Nantes, Randstad, Bordeaux Publisher: Architecture Workroom Brussels Designer: Joris Kritis with Rustan Söderling Printer: Mart.Spruijt Bookbinder: Hexspoor ISBN: 9789081953504
It would be difficult to find a website with comparable complexity which is as easily accessible as this book. Not only as far as orientation – the ‘what is where?’ – is concerned, but also with a view to the mastery of the amount of text and image constituents with their varying depth. How does it work? The designers give the heterogeneous editorial material of the five studies of urban planning a pronounced structure: deviants are handled separately, similes get equal treatment; there are semantic, inconspicuous yet noticeable paper changes; fold-out pages; undogmatic arrangements of pictorial material of varying quality. Thanks to the hollow spine, the thread-bound brochure opens without breaking the carton cover. Weighty problems in terms of book design have been solved in a professional manner.
BRONZE MEDAL
Estonia Ivar Sakk Aa – Zz. CONCISE HISTORY OF TYPOGRAPHY Publisher: Sakk&Sakk Designer: Ivar Sakk Printer: Tallinna Raamatutrükikoda, Polymer printing shop ISBN: 978-9949-302-26-0
We hear a collective groan from our colleagues in the typeface department: another book about fonts from the Romans to the digital revolution! Don’t judge so hastily. Because what catches the typographically oversaturated eye in this book is its peculiar clarity, free from any creative explosions. While there is a certain sense of déjà vu, we find a lapidary division into three parts, guided by a didactic Eros: a photographic case study of the status quo of fonts displayed in public spaces; a section with tables of type specimens – divided into lines with different cuts and sizes; a text section about the history of writing with explanatory illustrations. And there is something else that awakens curiosity: the Eastern European perspective of the Estonian author.
BRONZE MEDAL
Belgium David Widart La roue voilée Publisher: L’Amicale Books Designer: PLMD (pleaseletmedesign) + interns: Audé Gravé, Rosalie Wagner Illustrator / Photographer: David Widart Printer: NNstudio Binder: NNstudio & David Widart
Is this handful of papers actually a book? A video clip on paper? A bundle of photographic notes? Loose pages with coarsely pixelated black and white photographs and crudely typographed blue text are not even sharply folded but simply slung over and fixed with a flat blue rubber band. This banality casts a spell on the observer who examines and dismantles this ‘thing’ – a question of: shall I stay outside or shall I immerse myself? What looks like a low-budget production becomes the ideal form of microscopic snapshots from everyday life and, above and beyond that, the rudiment if not the archetype of a book. Yes, this handful of papers is a book, even if ‘the wheel is out of kilter’ – just like life itself.
BRONZE MEDAL
Poland Józef Wilkoń Psie życie Publisher: Wydawnictwo HOKUS-POKUS Marta Lipczyńska-Gil Designer & Illustrator: Józef Wilkoń and Piotr Gil Printer & Bookbinder: Oficyna Wydawnicza READ ME Włodzimierz Bińczyk SJ, Warszawa ISBN: 978-83-60402-57-3
A children’s book with unconventional illustrations and eccentric colouring. The image technology cocks a snook at the theoreticians of virtual reality. Because the figures of the dog story, the painted wood sculptures are both: paintings and reproduced objects; three-dimensional portraits, so to speak. And therefore the episodes come across beautifully contradictory and light-footed in a genuinely artificial world playing with a misconception – that it’s not a parallel world that shines through these pictures, but that they instead belong, materially and virtually, to our perceptible here and now. The blunt book format, the thick natural paper, the silver and black background, the bold, stamp-like typography are the formal means to keep this show rolling.
BRONZE MEDAL
Germany Marcel Beyer, Helmut Völter (Hrsg.) Wolkenstudien / Cloud Studies / Études de Nuages Publisher: Spector Books, Leipzig Designer: Helmut Völter, Leipzig Printing: Medialis Offsetdruckerei GmbH, Berlin Bookbinding: Stein + Lehmann, Berlin ISBN: 978-3-940064-99-8
That it is sometimes only possible to discuss scientific phenomena through the visual medium, particularly the artistic one, is something we have known since Heisenberg. With “Cloud Studies” we encounter a book devoting itself to this hazy line between art and science – for the heavens have been a place of research and of interpretation for as long as anyone can remember. Large-format pictures in colour or black-and-white, photographs or reproductions, which close in on their subject and then distance themselves from it, a far-reaching typographical concept with an obsessive eye for detail, alternating paper and the haptic features of the cover as well as the sophisticated edging – all these variations and shifts reflect their subject, as changeable as it is ephemeral: the clouds.
HONORARY APPRECIATION
Germany Hal Foster, Kate Fowle, Thomas Kellein Robert Longo – Charcoal Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH, Ostfildern Designer: Stapelberg & Fritz, Stuttgart Printing: Offsetdruckerei Karl Grammlich GmbH, Pliezhausen Bookbinding: Lachenmaier GmbH, Reutlingen Producer: Nadine Schmidt / Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH, Ostfildern ISBN: 978-3-7757-3196-6
Robert Longo’s charcoal drawings are presented here perfectly in the harmony of overall features – material and finish, colour, typography and continuity of design. The black spine with glossy black embossed text, the sturdy and uncoated grey card with author and title in narrow bold, also black embossed sans-serif, the black endpapers as well as three-sided black edging set the mood for this chiaroscuro – that play of light and shade which Longo pursues with such a high degree of mastery in all his works. The haptically pleasant soft uncoated paper requires lithography and printing of the highest order of precision to ensure that the charcoal drawings, in some cases very dark, do not merge into the paper. How closely the technical reproduction here has stuck to the essence of the original work.
HONORARY APPRECIATION
Germany Jewgenij Samjatin WIR Publisher: disadorno edition, Berlin Designer: Gaston Isoz, Berlin Printing: H & P Druck, Berlin Bookbinding: Leipziger Kunst- und Verlagsbuchbinderei GmbH, Leipzig/Baalsdorf ISBN: 978-3-941959-03-3
Book and accompanying booklet are held together by a sleeve construction made of yellow card cut diagonally; the book sports a green jacket with superimposed covers – the explanatory supplement has single-section binding protected by a double jacket. On smooth bookprinting paper in a slim and manageable format the typography makes an immaculate impression. The attentive use of non-justified text is particularly striking. The high area at the top of the double-page spreads is reserved for a vertical notation system whose fine blue lines suggest an association with officialdom. The aggregate colour scheme makes connections with regard to content: the “green wall” encircling the “single state”, or the “majolica blue”, colour of the sky and of the uniforms. And not least the constructivist allusion made by the outer sleeve construction.
HONORARY APPRECIATION
The Netherlands Marente Bloemheuvel, Giovanna Fossati, Jaap Guldemond Found Footage. Cinema Exposed Publisher: Amsterdam University Press, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Amsterdam Designer: Joseph Plateau, grafisch ontwerpers Printer: die Keure, Brugge (B) ISBN: 9789089644176
It looks as if the current media dispute – electronic, audiovisual and printed media entangled in a St. Vitus’s dance – is not quite as dramatic in the daily work of picture and information creators; the existence of this catalogue on the opening show of the new Netherlands film institute proves it. The beautiful, matte American cover that can be folded out into a poster introduces the mood and the tone of the imagery. The means of artistic book design employ the characteristics of a cinematographic atmosphere, divide words and pictures, differentiate between visual and textual qualities and create a self-contained documentation. The bookmark is a film strip – what a friendly gesture!
HONORARY APPRECIATION
The Netherlands Thomas Raat An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and More… Publisher: Onomatopee, Eindhoven Designer: Edwin van Gelder / Mainstudio Printer: Lecturis, Eindhoven Bookbinder: Patist, Den Dolder ISBN: 9789078454984
The publication with paintings by Thomas Raat performs a fascinating act of regression. The artist expurgates the covers of one to two-generation-old paperbacks of their textual constituents: he transfers the abstract geometrical graphics into large-scale oil paintings – and book titles become picture titles. The autonomy of the visual quality of this former commercial art can suddenly be physically felt – probably for the first time. And now these paintings are redirected to the original medium, but the cover motifs are translated into contents. The illustrated pages are interleaved by half-width coloured pages carrying the titles in free alignment and bold Grotesque – in a quasi emblematic process, with Lemma, Pictura and the absent epigram, the actual text of the book. Is there any other way for hidden poetry to unfold itself than in the medium ‘book’?
HONORARY APPRECIATION
Lithuania Margarita Matulytė Nihil obstat. Lietuvos fotografija sovietmečiu Publisher: Vilniaus dailės akademijos leidykla / Vilnius Academy of Arts Press Designer: Tomas Mrazauskas Printer: Balto print
The reader experiences this monography about Lithuanian photography and its relation to the official soviet picture programmes through the elementary forms of book typography: serif typeface in a comfortably legible size and properly spaced, slim columns and a wide margin for picture captions on symmetrical double pages with rough-cut edges, harmoniously placed footnotes with
extended reference numbers, lively column titles, illustrations that break away from the type area, splendid white spaces and chapter beginnings, matte natural paper with a glare-free white sheen. Three loose facsimile documents are held together with paper clips, the glued-off layered back with its collating marks remains visible due to the open spine of the book body, and the sturdy dust cover with its slanting upside-down is decorated with a separately glued picture.
PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES
Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, China, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Iran, Japan, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Taiwan, Czech Republic, Hungary.
JURY PANEL
Dr. Aladdin Jokhosha (Graphic Designer, Germany/Iraq) Gabriele Lenz (Graphic Designer, lenz+büro für visuelle gestaltung, Austria) Tomas Mrazauskas (freelance Graphic Designer, Germany/Lithuania) Prof. Felix Scheinberger (University of Applied Sciences, Munster, Germany) Roland Stieger (TGG Hafen Senn Stieger Atelier St. Gallen, Schwitzerland) Prof. Wim Westerveld (Weißensee School of Art Berlin, Germany) Susanne Zippel (Typographer/Graphic Designer, Mittelpunkt•Zhongdian, China/Germany).