Imprensa Nacional’s Itálica is a collection of comparative translations of Italian classics.

As design objects, the books are heavily inspired by early Italian printing and composition techniques. The layout pays homage to the work of the sixteenth century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius; through the choice of body typeface, by the arrangement of titles, blurbs, notes. Transitions generative textures inspired by mezzotint.

Volumes in the collection are made distinct by the use of colour and texture. Colours are extracted from images of several italian cities and landscapes, combining a metallic spot colour screenprint on coloured paper. Textures are blind stampings of marbled paper.

The Book Cover is a manual on industrial bookbinding, a deep dive in cover making assembly techniques.

Two Smyth sewn book blocks, one for each language (Portuguese and English), come together in a w-shaped cover with flaps, joined by Swiss binding. This allows for an active, varying role of the cover in the reading experience, beyond a purely protective function.

Illustrations and its typeface, Uivo, were developed for the Making a Book collection in order to systematise all visual elements.

Organised in degrees of complexity of covermaking. Additional sections on materials, processes and anatomy. Written and designed with quick consultation in mind.

The Book Box is a kit of 20 sample books, each bound and covered with different industrial bookbinding techniques. Part of the Making a Book collection, along with The Book Block and The Book Cover, dedicated to industrial bookbinding.

Designed to focus the attention on the subtle intricacies of bookbinding techniques in meetings, brainstorming sessions and lecturing.

From Smyth to Singer sewing, two-crease paperback to traditional round spine hardcover, The Book Box collects these industrial bookbinding techniques while details production details: how was each single book made, which materials were used, and, of course, where to find more information in The Book Block and The Book Cover.

In calligraphy, ‘Ductus’ is the direction, number and sequence of strokes necessary to create letterforms. For this project, by freely amplifying the experience of lines becoming letters, I set about trying to understand ‘Ductus’ — the steps and processes that constitute calligraphy.

I began with the first step, which was, obviously, the line — drawing pages and pages of straight parallel lines, slowly starting to give them angles with increasing complexity. Before long, they began resembling letters, and I organically moved towards full scripts. From there, I continued on this expedition, roaming through the history of handwriting models, from Gothics to Romans to Copperplates.

ContactZone discusses essential concepts of art-historical research condensed into succinct keywords. Leading lights from art and academia on a national and international level have contributed various texts and images to this book. The result is a loose collection of materials that serves as a springboard for contemporary thought processes and can be regarded as a blueprint for future action. Themes, form, and content interact in meaningful ways, creating a forum that allows crosscutting perspectives on objects, places, and people to emerge.

In den letzten zehn Jahren hat der niederländische Fotograf Erik van der Weijde mehr als 50 Publikationen veröffentlicht – viele hat er über seinen eigenen Verlag 4478 zine distribuiert. ›This Is Not My Book‹ gibt erstmals
einen Überblick über sein Werk, das zu den wichtigsten künstlerischen Positionen am Schnittpunkt von Foto­grafie und Independent Publishing zählt.

Der Band zeigt in großformatigen Tableaus die Verbindungslinien zwischen den einzelnen Publikationen, er enthält das ›Publishing Manifesto‹ des Künstlers und weitere Texte
sowie fünf Gespräche mit den Verlegern Anne König und Jan Wenzel.

Die Arbeiten und Texte von Hito Steyerl
gehören zu den zentralen Positionen, wenn es um die aktuelle Reflexion der gesellschaftlichen Rolle von Kunst und Museum geht, um das Experimentieren mit medialen Präsentationsformen und um die kritische Auseinandersetzung beim Einsatz von künstlicher Intelligenz.

Der umfassende monographische Band, der sich aus zwei Richtungen lesen lässt und in der Buchmitte aufeinander trifft, erscheint anlässlich Hito Steyerls Doppelausstellung im Centre Pompidou Paris und der Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

Die Straße der Revolution liegt im Zentrum von Teheran, einer Hauptader des kulturellen Lebens. ›Enghelab Street‹ zeigt Foto- und Propagandabücher, die die iranische Künstlerin Hannah Darabi dort gesammelt hat.

Anhand von Drucksachen, die von 1979 bis 1983 veröffentlicht wurden – der kurzen Zeitspanne nach dem Ende des Schah-Regimes, als die islamische Regierung in den Anfängen war und Meinungsfreiheit herrschte – führt sie uns ins Zentrum einer künstlerisch und kulturell intensiven Periode der iranischen Geschichte.

Der Legende nach wurde die Santa Casa, in der Maria der Verkündigungsengel erschienen war, von Engeln aus Nazareth nach Loreto versetzt. Die Schweizer Künstler Davide Cascio und Christian Kathriner entwickelten 2009 eine Installation, die auf diese Legende Bezug nimmt. Für die Wallfahrtskapelle Hergiswald, die eine Nachbildung der Santa Casa darstellt, entstanden zwei Wandteppiche, gewoben auf einem CAD-gesteuerten Webstuhl in Flandern.

›Transposition‹ stellt die temporäre Rauminstallation vor, die die opulente
Ausschmückung der Barockkapelle von Hergiswald aufnimmt, und sie zugleich durch eine zeitgenössische Ästhetik bricht.

Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg und Yoko Ono – Jonas Mekas war mit vielen New Yorker Künstlern eng vertraut. Der gebürtige Litauer kam 1949 nach Brooklyn und begann dort, seine ersten Experimentalfilme zu drehen. Mekas entwickelte eine Form des Tagebuchfilms, in dem er seine alltäglichen Beobachtungen festhielt. Er wurde zum Seismographen der New Yorker Künstlerszene und Vordenker des amerikanischen Avantgarde-Kinos.

›Scrapbook of the Sixties‹ enthält veröffentlichte und unveröffentlichte Texte, die Mekas als aufmerksamen Tagebuchschreiber und einzigartigen Chronisten der Gegenwart zeigen.

Anlässlich des 85. Geburtstags von Alexander Kluge richtete das Museum Folkwang dem Filmemacher, Autor und Künstler eine umfassende Werkschau aus. Die Ausstellung führt in sein künstlerisches ›Pluriversum‹ ein und zielt auf die Veranschaulichung von Kluges zentralen Methoden, Themen und Denkwegen.

Im Zentrum stehen dabei seine Filmcollagen. Die Publikation greift die Themen der Ausstellung auf und stellt das für Kluge zentrale Arbeitsprinzip der Kollaboration ins Zentrum – das ›Zusammendenken‹ mit Wissenschaftlern und Künstlern wie beispielsweise Thomas Demand, Gerhard Richter oder Ben Lerner. Die Publikation entstand in enger Zusammenarbeit mit Alexander Kluge.

Von 1958 bis 1977 schrieb der Filme­macher und Autor Jonas Mekas wöchtlich für die Zeitung ›Village Voice‹ seine Kolumne ›Movie Journal‹, in der er zahlreiche Gespräche mit Filme­machern aus aller Welt veröffentlichte.

In ›Conversations‹ sind erstmals in Buchform jene Interviews mit befreundeten Filmemachern und Wegbegleitern versammelt, darunter John
Cassavetes, Peter Kubelka, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Barbara Rubin und Andy Warhol. Fotomaterial sowie Skizzen, Briefe und Auszüge aus Drehbüchern ergänzen die Textsammlung.

Anlässlich seiner Ausstellung im Photo Elysée in Lausanne werden zentrale Serien aus Koudelkas fotografischem Werk zusammen mit thematischen Konstellationen gezeigt, die sich aus der Logik seines Archives ableiten. Die Vielzahl an Materialien wurde aus den über 30.000 Kleinbildkontakt­bögen seines Archivs ausgewählt.

›IKONAR‹ ist somit eine neue Art der Zusammenschau von Koudelkas Arbeiten und gibt Einblick in deren Entwicklungsprozesse, die über die Jahre 1960 bis 2012 reichen.

›Matter‹ analysiert die uralte Frage des Seins. Materie ist träge, unbeweglich, unfähig zur Reproduktion, doch sie ist der Weg zum Leben. Ein Organismus durchläuft im Laufe seines Lebens­zyklus viele Veränderungen – er wächst,
lernt, entwickelt sich und stirbt –, doch was stets bleibt, ist die Materie.

Der spanische Künstler Aleix Plademunt
arbeitete seit 2013 an ›Matter‹, seinem bisher umfangreichsten fotografischen Vorhaben. Über eine Kette von Asso­ziationen hat sich seine umfangreiche Fotoserie schließlich in einem Buch­objekt manifestiert. Ein Gedanken­strom, der zu einer physischen Publikation geworden ist.

Angela Lyn’s book “On the Edge of Time – Villa Arconati-FAR” is a personal search for traces, exhibition documentation and an overview of Angela Lyn’s complex work at the same time. The book conveys how the artist is able to respond to the baroque Villa Arconati near Milan with precise yet sensitive interventions. TGG designed the book in close collaboration with the artist.

The richly illustrated book provides insights into the construction, the exhibitions and the tasks of the new natural history museum in St.Gallen. It tells the story of an ancient taxidermy crocodile that keeps moving with a collection of curiosities and finally finds its home in a modern museum.

On some index cards that were kept about the guests of the Grand Hotel Waldhaus in Vulpera it says: Apparently the hotel didn’t want every guest to come back. The concierge and receptionists endured the rude behavior of some of their illustrious and wealthy guests and recorded these experiences on individual index cards. In 1989 the Hotel Waldhaus burned down. However, among the items recovered from the remains were about 20,000 index cards belonging to hotel guests. This rare resource not only offers an interesting insight into the hotel’s past guests, but also the staff who kept the files.

A publication as a work of art: The image of the superhero:in is omnipresent in pop culture, we examine it for its topicality in today’s contemporary historical context. In the 5 parts of the epic, the superhero:in is illuminated from different angles. The approach of this utopian image critically with existing narratives, in a poetic-abstract way. It is about questioning gender stereotypes and normative heroine narratives, as we know them from mainstream Hollywood cinema. In the 5 parts of the epic, the superhero is examined from different angles. In the beginning she is needed, how do they make of our ideals, which she can not withstand and at which she breaks in the end.

The project »0001—1282« questions the medium book in an experimental way and breaks up the book body as such. 1282 lines of pure text deal with the development of the moving image within (post) pop culture phenomena (explicitly: social media). In the foreground of this work is vertical video, which now dominates social media. Secondarily, the short-livedness of trends and the controlling algorithm are discussed. The body of the book is based on endless feeds in social networks and imitates endless scrolling through its length. In terms of content, emotional considerations meet objectively informative text and create an interplay that is visually reminiscent of the projection of a film strip.

Emotional Gamut recognizes and celebrates the complex interconnections of our emotional experiences and that they are not made up of emotional binaries but are much more nuanced. It presents visual analogies for the seven primary emotions, each having a palette of typography, colors, and unique shapes. The project comes together as a visual system that helps express how different emotions overlap and make our emotional experiences rich and layered using a variety of mediums. Employing the tools of graphic design to convey emotion the project turns intangible feelings into a tangible sign system.
The book is a detailed documentation of the process of developing the project.

The best architects publication «two thousand twenty one» is impressive for its absolutely minimalist approach. The cover is completely unprinted and plays with the exciting materiality of natural cardboard. Its rough structure creates an almost velvety surface with an extraordinary tactile quality.

The pure die-cutting creates an exciting overlap with the print underneath. The die-cut English title and the print of the German title behind it create an irritation that is very similar to a camouflage effect. The rough and pure appearance continues on the spine of the book. White crepe paper refines the book spine and completes the puristic design of the binding.

Fresh yellow and bright green dominate the publication «best architects 23». Only the natural, haptically appealing material and the colour determine the title of the book. The deformation of the material alone by means of a strong raised embossing gives the cover its face, and a subtle play of light and shadow is created. A minimalist approach that also permeates the details of the binding.

The lamination of two different coloured through-dyed cardboards creates a subtle play of colours at the cut edges. This play of colours is also continued inside the book by means of the typography and the binding with a yellow thread.

In white screen printing on rough natural cardboard, the number 22 is arranged in such a way that a graphic “artwork” is created on the cover of the publication. The title “22” thus combines into a striking pattern and only becomes recognisable as such at second glance. Through insertions and additions, a harmonious whole is thus created – a strategy that is also found in some of the projects in the book. The materiality and the process of making are the focus of the type of binding. With the experimental treatment of the material paper, its properties are changed in such a way that a coarse-grained but at the same time fluffy surface is created at the book’s edge.

Jaroslav Benda (1882–1970) is one of the most unique figures in the history of Czech type design. His extensive lifelong work is based on a strong and distinctive manuscript of original letterforms. Many of his works would become crucial for Czech Cubism and Art Deco. Equally important is his involvement in building the visual identity of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Unfortunately, Benda’s work fell into oblivion for many decades and a comprehensive biography of Benda has never been published. Until now. Nearly half a century after his death, we presented to the Czech public the fruit of five years of our work – Jaroslav Benda 1882–1970: Typographic designs and letterforms