Effortless Perfection
I produced a limited-edition book to celebrate the type family Baskerville and the genius of the man behind it. The type family is centred around simplicity, elegance and clarity, so I produced photographs to pin down each of these abstract qualities.
Imagery
I represented simplicity with images of water, elegance with ballet dancers and clarity with photographs of the wind. I weaved the story of Baskerville throughout these images and interspersed photographic spreads with typographic spreads.
Colour palette and type detailing
The deep blue tones used are a nod to the very dark ink John Baskerville created in order to achieve a high contrast (and therefore high legibility) between the printed typeface and the paper. I used the letters a–z to denote each page instead of numbers.
Typographic spreads
I used these spreads to explain the typeface’s character in an expressive way using only typography.
Pace
I created a good pace throughout the book by interspersing the three photograph subjects with typographic subjects. Alternating between full bleed images, smaller thumbnail images and more fluid typographic spreads also enlivened the pace, as did switching between verso and recto layouts.
