The Open End

I was asked by Ellen Lupton to help design a new book she and product designer Inna Alesina were publishing in the Spring of 2010. The book is titled Exploring Materials: A Hands-On Guide to Product Design and is being published jointly by MICA and Princeton Architectural Press. It is a guidebook of sorts that uses student work as a means to illustrate how to use various materials and tools for design thinking and making.

The version I was given already had a solid foundation. The content was there; it just needed some attention to typography, grid structure and an overall tightening up before it went to press.

I overhauled the grid structure and increased the number of columns used throughout. This gave me more flexibiliy compositionally as well as helping to establish a more dynamic and active heirarchy.

The book was already using Lucas de Groot’s Thesis family of typefaces, but I incorporated a few more variants to the usage throughout in order to strengthen and broaden the textual heirarchy throughout.