Art + Design: It’s Exquisite!
10.1.10 | Tera Killip | Art and Design
“The only drawing game I’ve ever played with my friends was Pictionary, so I had no idea what Exquisite Corpse actually was. Once I understood the concept, I sat down with our team to find a way to transform this game into a book that properly highlighted such an interesting subject!
We had 100 pieces of art from a wide array of emerging indie artists and wanted to organize that art into 10 chapters. How do you make a book of 10 accordions that fold out? We tried several variations – some were too large and cumbersome while others felt like they would fall apart once opened. It was a long road to find a format that wasn’t just your ordinary reading book. We ended up using a concertina binding that allowed for the accordions to be bound at the spine, much like a photo album with large pages. Success, right? Well, not quite.
The design of the book has blue line art on the concertina as well as the first/last pages of the accordion. Color matching on these two different stocks was a challenge. At first, the concertina piece was made of a thick cardstock that had a warm hue to it while the accordion paper was a cooler tone. The blues just did not match. We changed the concertina so it was printed on the same stock as the accordions, which helped a lot. It wasn’t a perfect match though and since this blue ran throughout the whole book, we needed it to be as close to perfect as printing allowed. We ended up using a PMS blue with Process black for both the accordions and the concertina piece.
As we proofed the book, we needed to make mockups to be sure that the horizon line of the artwork was aligning properly. This looked good in the second round of mockups and we thought we were ready to print. Then the designer noticed a folding problem. The accordions toward the center of the book had the last page folding over at the spine. This looked like a mistake but how could we fix it? We needed to add 3mm to the spine. This meant that EVERY piece of art for the concertina (12 in total) and for the first/last pages of the accordion (20 in total) needed to be widened by 3mm. When we saw the next round of mockups, the problem had disappeared.
Four months later, it was finally time to print and bind! Now that was a success! See for yourself in The Exquisite Book!”
And if you are lucky enough to be in NY, SF or Chicago, come out and join us to celebrate the launch of the book.
San Francisco
Thursday, Oct. 14, 7 pm
Rare Device
1845 Market Street
New York/Brooklyn
Friday, October 22nd, 6 pm
powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street, DUMBO
Chicago
Friday, November 5, 7 pm
Quimby’s Bookstore
1854 W. North Avenue
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