Research began by looking at Wallpaper city guides. They produce publications about different cities around the world aimed at an artistic audience to what this brief requires. They use bold block colours you initially draw your eye to the publications, each colour is informed by the city itself, inspired by the national colours, food, clothing and popular culture of the city.
They use variants of high quality matte stock for the type based pages and some silk stock for the full spread photography pages. The variation and consideration in stock according to the different content is something mainly appreciated by artists who understand the considerations making it more appropriate to the target audience. They also use tabs within the books for ease of navigation, this makes them really accessible to the audience and I personally think for a city guide you need to be able to navigate it quickly if you're looking for a spontaneous day out to see an attraction.
Wallpaper also have an app, although this isn't part of the brief it will still be a consideration. An app would open up the target audience to more general public in addition to the book aimed at people interested in art and photography.
http://www.kapitza.com/geometric-book/y1wn8q16u6lyl6euq5tfnmlgfxlwqw
Looking further at publications aimed specifically at my target audience.
These two books are by the design agency Kapitza, the first book uses vectored patterns created from simple geometric shapes. They use bright contrasting colours to create mesmerizing patterns. Although the book has no content and initially seems unrelated to my brief, the use of colour and patterns is a really effective way of drawing in a creative audience who find visually simulating publications appealing rather than text heavy books.
This second book 'organic' uses the same principles of shape and colour but the designs are all analoge made then edited digitally afterwards. This application is really interesting and possibly more inspiring for my project. When photographing type around Hull there was a heavy influx of hand drawn type to express the personalities of the emerging art culture. Creating analogue patterns and illustrations as part of my publication could be a great way of integrating both analogue and digital media.
At this point my initial ideas are to include both considered and minimal layout design that creates something easily legible and appealing to modernist designers and minimalists. But then to contrast this alongside some more expressive and illustrative elements to the publication.
I decided to do some 1st hand research at the local independent artist book store The Village to observe the overall style and production of their publications.
Illustrative style, colourful, coloured stock choices, lot of black ink printing.
Grainy looking matte stock choices and stippled/scanned looking photo aesthetic.
Colour choices are careful, bold, block, pastel.
Intelligent designs, use of illusion.
Large photographs, spanning full pages and spreads, negative space, large type.
There's definite themes within art and photography books.
During this research I came across a series of books called Kingdom by Chiara de Franciscis.
The books combine 4 different colours of stock below heavy black and white (threshold) photography to create a unique and bold editorial design. This book has definitely inspired the idea to combine different stock types within my publication as the artistic target audience will appreciate the consideration of well selected and varying stock.
layout inspiration
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The images above show books that use similar content to mine and are aimed at the same target audience. They all use white space and a generally minimal layout so nothing distracts you from the images themselves, they are also light on type for this reason. The audience want to appreciate the photographs and type within them rather than be distracted completely by description.
Another design method you can use to create a hierarchy between images and type is to use full bleed images. Overlaid type or no type at all leaves the image to the audiences full interpretation before reading the authors interpretation.
The use of multiple stock choices changes the way you see images and in this context forces the audience more to concentrate on shape, composition and context rather than colour. The idea of inlaying different formats within a publication also creates a hierarchy, the smaller format becomes lower in your focus.
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