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For the catalogue of The Best German Book Design 2026, Studio Pandan explores what happens when one book is reproduced within another. “Same Same But Different — Books in Reproduction” describes the concept, the design takes the idea that every reproduction is also a transformation as its starting point: colours shift, details are isolated, some elements disappear while others become more prominent. Rather than neutralising these changes, the catalogue turns them into its central design principle.
The 25 award-winning books and three winners of the Award for Young Book Design are presented through different combinations of spot colours, shifting between details, full spreads and cover views. Elements from the printing process itself, such as colour control strips and registration marks, become part of the visual language.
To mark the 60th anniversary of Stiftung Buchkunst, Studio Pandan not only used no fewer than eleven colours in the printing process, but also incorporated archival material from six decades of German book design, researched at the foundation’s archive at the German National Library in Leipzig and hidden in pockets in the book’s intro and outro.
