Visiting Professional: Joe Gilmore

TALK: What is a book?

Joe Gilmore specialises in art books - he thinks more about the production of the publication.

There's lots of space within book design to be innovative - art books can be imaginative, special, more considered than a novel.

• sevenpointfourfivebooks.eu - The Kippenberger challenge - an open invitation by a gallery to invite artists to create 7.45 / 8 books a year. Help build a portfolio and make you prolific.
• books aren't all about the content - the way its produced can provide an experience.
• Finnegan's Wake 
• constantly questioning the way a book exists - its function etc

He doesn't design for the audience directly - designs what he's interested in and what he believes reflects the content and this is why the audience would engage with it. Never sure of who's going to engage with your book.

Experimentation is key - making things for the sake of making them without having to fulfil a purpose but just to create something new. 

BRIEF

In groups, create a zine responding to the subject of "the book". The book should reveal something about books, the way they are read, designed, stored, archived, found, used, written, destroyed, etc.

Our Concept: our idea was to explore the function of books by applying 3 rules to pages scanned in from magazines. We wanted to understand the function of books as a communication tool - exploring how content, text and negative space all influence a readers understanding of the message being communicated to them.

Our three rules were:

Replace image with text.

Replace text with blank space.

Replace blank space with image.

OUTCOME

Overall I really enjoyed this workshop - trying to come up with a concept and work quickly within the time frame was a challenge but allowed us to think about what we want to communicate and how to achieve it. I think we could have possibly pushed this idea further by imitating the paper stock used in the magazines or something completely contrasting it however digital print was fully booked. If this were developed, I would also have it perfect bound as it would need more pages, and it would represent the magazines we scanned.