Contemporary book design

19 January 2007, 10.00am–5.30pm

A one-day conference at St Bride Library featuring talks from some of the world's leading book designers

The speakers

• Andrew Barker
• Derek Birdsall
• Françoise Berserik
• Phil Baines
• Robert Dalrymple
• Ron Costley
• Jim Stoddart

Admission £50/students £35

To book, or for more information, please contact the St Bride Foundation: 020 7353 3331 / lauranewport@stbridefoundation.org

The talks

Book design details

I remain interested in the more prosaic aspects of book design: readability and sequencing of text, contiguity and captioning of illustrations. I am somewhat obsessed by the reproduction of paintings and objects in scale to each other and the use of life-size details – information which is free – like daylight.

Derek Birdsall studied at Wakefield College of Art (1949–52) and the Central School of Arts and Crafts (1952–55). He has edited and designed books on chess, a visual history of technology, the living treasures of Japan, Lucian Freud, and is currently editing and designing a catalogue raisonné of George Stubbs for Judy Egerton at the Paul Mellon Centre. His Notes on book design was published by Yale University Press in 2004. In 2005 he was awarded the Prince Philip Designers prize.

The black art of book design

Book design is not rocket science, but despite that I'm going to be talking about nuts and bolts. The subject of this talk is the everyday stuff of book design, stuff that often gets overlooked but which it is good to be reminded about.

Andrew Barker completed his degree in Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading and has been working primarily as a book designer ever since. He’s worked both freelance and on the full-time staff of publishing houses large and small, and designed more books than you can shake a stick at.

A happy childhood is a designer’s goldmine

Françoise Berserik studied at the the University of Reading’s Department of Typography & Graphic Communication as a postgraduate. She now works as a freelance book typographer and letter carver in stone, and teaches these subjects on the postgraduate Type & Media course at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

Books design themselves

While I have always had a fascination with grids and formal structures, my approach has always been to let the material of a book – images, subject matter and style of text – as well as the restriction of budget, suggest the design. For the last ten years I have worked increasingly often with artists, particularly those associated with Matt’s Gallery in London. At Matt’s the process of making books is often a three-way collaborative process between the artist, the gallery’s Director Robin Klassnik, and myself. For this presentation I will focus on a few specific projects where this process has resulted in unusual solutions.

Phil Baines studied at St Martin’s School of Art and the RCA. He combines design work with lecturing at Central Saint Martins (where he is now Professor of Typography), and writing. As part of Penguin Books’ design team, he won a D&AD Silver Award for the Great Ideas series in 2005. He is a frequent contributor for Eye magazine and has written three books, Type & typography (2002, with Andrew Haslam), Signs (2003, with Catherine Dixon) and Penguin by design (2005).

We’ve never had it so good

Whatever your view on the current state of book design, there has never been a better time to be a designer. Rather than harking back to some ill-defined golden age, we should be celebrating the present. The second half of the twentieth century was a time of technological meltdown but, amazingly, from the ashes a digital phoenix has arisen. If William Morris was alive today, one of the things that he would have known to be useful, and believed beautiful, would be his Mac.

Robert Dalrymple is a freelance designer based in Edinburgh who specialises in the production of catalogues for museums and galleries. After leaving art college he worked at Westerham Press, the Tate Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland – but not as a designer. Ten years on, in 1990, the discovery of the Mac persuaded him to become one.

Don’t judge a book by its cover

Is it possible to have an objective assessment of the book as a practical object?

Ron Costley studied painting, drawing and lithography before joining the Shenval Press where he was responsible for the design typography and production of a wide range of printed matter. In 1977 he moved from printing to publishing and worked successively at the Scolar Press, Chatto & Windus and Faber and Faber where he continues to design books. He has lectured on his work as a book designer and has judged book design competitions in the UK and US.

Books, design and the digital age

When ebooks eventually manage to achieve their own iPod revolution, where will that leave printed books? And where does it steer book design? And will it be a rose revolution, or a bloody fight?

Jim Stoddart left college in Sheffield and went straight into a job at Bill Smith Studio in London designing record and CD covers. He joined Penguin Books five years later where he worked as a cover designer, and then he worked for a year with Chris Ashworth under Lewis Blackwell at Getty Images. In 2001 he returned to Penguin as Art Director of Penguin Press. For their work on the Great Ideas series, Jim’s team earned a place on the Design Museum’s Designer of the Year Award shortlist in 2005.