Posted by Peter Blaiwas on Tue, May 11, 2010
For three weeks now, I've been working on a blog about color correction for digital and print publications. I think I've developed decent skills in this area during my many years of work in graphic design and production, so I thought I could provide some tips readers might appreciate when left to fend for themselves while producing a publication.
I began by wrestling with ways to describe how to attain accurate reproduction of original artworks and display their images consistently across a variety of media. This brought me to consider the astonishing range of displays on which people can presently view the same, single image, and how widely color and contrast is likely to shift with each of those displays. Always developing printing capabilities skew things even further.
Then I considered how millions of people, like me, spend hours in front of computers, being deluged by countless images. When you contend with that kind of visual saturation on a daily basis, the only chance an image has to grab your attention is if there is something really wrong with it. Even then, I expect that such an egregious error would also need to be engaging enough to keep the viewer from scrolling and clicking.
As you can see, color correction had taken a back seat to a consideration of what it presently means to look at art.
On the print side, my company produces catalogs for museum exhibitions and collections as well as other kinds of books that deal with fine art and architecture. We share with our photographers, production managers, prepress techs, and printers the responsibility for controlling consistency and delivering accurate reproduction. While there is much room for error, the variables are manageable, and we all have the common goal of producing an accurate printed page. At every step along the way, we spend a great deal of time comparing and adjusting each piece in order to provide readers with a collection of images with which they will also want to spend time.
Lately, we have been considering how the great shift from print to digital publishing will affect our niche market of fine art publishing, and how best to utilize these new, always evolving technologies. We've met with firms that adapt picture-driven books to e-book format. To date, the most successful of these are instructional titles (e.g., cooking, craft, and DIY books and magazines). But, chances are that the reader who spends time studying specific images or text in such books is doing so to clear up confusion about the subject rather than out of appreciation for the pictures.
I'd really like to know if some people would prefer to study a fine art reproduction on a monitor rather than on the printed page. I expect there are many who do, and no doubt I will find their reasons surprising.
I recently talked with a gallery owner who specializes in contemporary and vintage silver print photographs. We talked about how the tiny, rarified market for fine art photography books continues to shrink. He suggested that the flood of digital images that has become available to everyone, everywhere could cause people to forget the pleasures of viewing photographic prints "in the flesh," which could easily lead to a wholesale loss of interest in attending photography exhibits at galleries or museums. An excessively gloomy forecast, perhaps, but it does cause me to wonder if we are all progressively losing our capacity for sustained visual attention.
Posted by Peter Blaiwas on Fri, Mar 05, 2010
I am very fortunate to be able to design and produce wonderful illustrated books on painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and architecture for museums as well as university and commercial publishers. I also take great pleasure in perusing a thoughtfully designed book-with-pictures, appreciating the pacing and rhythm of its layout and how text and art refer to and enhance each other.
In my work I strive to provide the viewer with text that is both easy to read and scan for specific information, as well as presenting pictures that one can scan with ease; taking in its surface or boundaries or finding its compositional (or metaphoric) focus.
Of course, all this suggests my preference for holding a book in my hands, scanning spreads from left to right, and turning pages. This experience may be destined for obsolescence, and at Vern Associates we are cautiously adapting our work to accommodate the insistent shift from print-on-paper to digital books.
One seldom visits a site or reads a blog that doesn't supplement its text with video. This is what most people have come to expect from an interactive medium, and video can convey a great deal of information effectively and persuasively. It is a boon for those looking for information on how to do something, because you can watch someone demonstrate the task. I'm more skeptical of sites that combine text with talking heads who instruct, coach, sell, or what have you.
I recently visited two publishing sites that sell hybrid book-and-video titles and found that they to relate to each other in unexpected ways.
Vook is a web-based application that partners with magazine and book publishers to produce highly interactive digital books that you can access on PCs, digital readers, or mobile phones. These vooks include both text and video, along with links to social media sites. Some titles, such as those about cooking and fitness are a good fit for this format. Fiction titles often include dramatized versions of the story, alongside the text. Another discovery was the children's and Y-A author Patrick Carman's Skeleton Creek series (Scholastic). Carman wrote an interesting piece in Publisher's Weekly about his successful series that gets kids really interested in reading.
These stories are presented as text followed by video and so on. This video carrot works really well in making the written word much less of a stick. In the Skeleton Creek books, kids must finish reading before they get to the movie. I don't think that would fly with customers downloading novels from Vook.
The voices in my head
I've never mentioned this to anyone—nor had reason to, until now—but when I read, I "hear" the words in my own voice. My voice is modulated depending on the topic. It is very nondescript when I am calculating figures in a math text, and can get quite dramatic for fiction, a higher pitch for female characters, an appropriate accent for English or French or Bostonian characters. It seems to me that these sounds become an integral part of how I comprehend the written word, make it part of my memory, and classify its value. More important, my internal voice is my first step to visualizing the images and situation being described. I'd like to think that other people share this experience while reading. If not, they must have other means of processing words and internalizing stories. I don't understand how the same degree of comprehension is possible from watching a scripted, filmed, and edited version of that same story, but would love to know if other people share my opinion.
Posted by Peter Blaiwas on Fri, Nov 06, 2009
Last week, I began examining some favorite VAI fine art and architecture illustrated book projects using the journalist’s basic storytelling structure—who, what, when, where, and why—to consider how VAI integrates graphic design in the service of animating a book’s story. Part 1 considered the who and what; part 2 looks at the remaining three Ws.
When—Samuel McIntire: Carving an American Style
In 2008, Vern Associates produced the book, which accompanied an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, on Samuel McIntire, one of federal-period New England’s preeminent master woodcarvers and architects. The number and variety of objects in this exhibition gave the visitor an in-depth look at life in the upper reaches of society during the period. Like the exhibition itself, the design of the publication reflected styles of the day. For example, I was careful to employ colors McIntire used in his interior decoration and set the text in Baskerville, a popular typeface during McIntire’s era.
Where—Means of Grace, Hope of Glory: Trinity Church in the City of Boston
Vern Associates was commissioned to help commemorate the 125th anniversary of the Trinity Church building, H. H. Richardson’s masterpiece in Boston’s Copley Square. Given the opportunity to work with some of the city’s premier architectural photographers, I art directed the new photography of the building’s interior and exterior, which was created for the publication.
The building is a perennial favorite of architects and laymen alike, so it was imperative to convey a sense of place throughout the book, from the way the church is sited in the square and relates to its surroundings to how the individual might feel sitting alone in the vast interior.
Brian and I met with Trinity and proposed a “birds-eye” tour of the church, beginning with the view high above Copley Square, then exploring each face of the exterior up close, and finally heading inside for an in-depth look at the interior, both high & low.
Photographs of worshipers and visitors in all of the seasons are interspersed throughout the book, to convey the sense of spiritual sustenance this building has offered to so many for so long.
Why—Visualizing Density, by Julie Campoli and Alex S. McLean
Visualizing Density was the first book we produced for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, which has become one of our longtime clients. Lincoln Institute, which publishes professional and scholarly books on urban planning and land conservation policy, sought our help in creating what would be their most ambitious illustrated book to date.
The two authors—Julie Campoli, an urban designer, and Alex McLean, a world-renowned aerial photographer—devoted years to preparing this exhaustive reference about residential density as witnessed in a wide range of urban areas. McLean shot thousands of aerial photographs throughout the United States, then Campoli wrote the text that accompanies them. We worked with Lincoln Institute and the authors to design a matrix of photos that display a single-acre plot in these residential neighborhoods. We then organized them, starting with sparsely populated areas and progressing toward ever-higher density. Each grouping shows aerial photos of the neighborhood, its plan and street pattern, and its context within its particular city or town.
The result is a comprehensive reference that allows urban designers and architects to compare the successes and failures of rural areas, suburbs, and densely packed cities, demonstrating how each might suggest ways to improve neighborhood planning for all combinations of living areas.