Hasta La Ideas

Adam Michaels and Anna Rieger of Project Projects looking over Designing Here/Now

Core77 was delighted to work with New York-based studio Project Projects to design the Designing Here/Now, published by Thames and Hudson. Headed by Adam Michaels and Prem Krishnamurthy, Project Projects is a design studio focusing on print, identity, exhibition and interactive work with clients in art and architecture. In addition to client-based work, the studio initiates and produces independent curatorial and publishing projects.

We sat down with Michaels and designer Anna Rieger to talk about the inception of the project and how it took form.

Core77: We were excited to work with Project Projects on one of the most ambitious projects we’ve ever taken on. Tell us how you began the design process and what challenges you saw at its inception?

Adam Michaels: We, too, were thrilled to be asked by Core77 to collaborate on Designing Here/Now. It’s always a pleasure to work on projects in which design itself is the overt subject matter, as we certainly remain obsessed with this stuff. As potential readers, we found the book’s vast array of projects (spanning innumerable media and materials) to be an intriguing, valuable source of information.

Anna Rieger: Core77 had never published a book about their awards before, though they’ve had a well-visited website for years. In considering the book’s design, we thought about the web’s interactive features (for example, the live video announcements about the awards, and videos helping to show objects’ materiality). For the book we tried to emphasize the strengths of the medium, creating a design that would reward sustained attention (still easier with a book than in the midst of the web’s many distractions) and contemplation, while allowing for quick, occasional browsing (the book’s navigation is always quite clear so the reader would never feel lost).

How did you approach this project given how many categories and discrete elements of content were involved in the final piece?

AM: As book designers, we’re drawn to projects with a degree of complexity and scale, in which we determine through typographic, formal, and material means how best to bring clarity to substantial amounts of information. So we were enthusiastic to develop an overall design that balances a consistent, overarching structure (crucial when working at a scale such as that of this 448-page book) with a varied, playful flow through the book’s contents from spread to spread.

This flow is first structured by the book’s categorical breakdown (also articulated through elements such as running headers); then a relative weighting of projects kicks in (award winners are generally shown at a greater scale); subsequently, the spreads become the result of a process akin to that of assembling a kind of free-form, information-dense jigsaw puzzle. Variables include the details of text per entry; type of image; potential scale of image (resolution issues remain the scourge of this sort of project, involving hundreds of images from nearly as many sources). Each layout is then the result of an attempt to produce an appealing composition—also making sure a given set of projects works well together on the page—after taking this significant range of details into account.

The Project Projects office in New York City

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