The Virtuous Book
The goal of the virtuous book was to design a book based around an excerpt from Design as Art written by the famous Italian artist Bruno Munari. The book had to be a minimum of 52 pages, and we were to find a secondary source that strategically paired well with the Munari excerpt. This was a typography focus project, so we were required to include several different types of typographic elements including callouts, sidebar captions & footnotes.
Boris Müller
Boris is professor for Interaction Design in Potsdam Germany and co-director of the Urban Complexity Lab – a research space at the intersection of design, science and the humanities. He has received a diploma in Graphic Design from the Hochschule für Künste (College of Art and Design) in Bremen, Germany and a MA in Computer Related Design from the Royal College of Art London. After being a visiting professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, he became a professor for Interaction Design at the Interface Design programme at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.
Bruno Munari
Bruno Munari (October 24, 1907 in Milan – September 29, 1998 in Milan) was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non-visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity. On the utility of art, Munari once said “Art shall not be separated from life: things that are good to look at, and bad to be used, should not exist.”
Two Amazing Authors
Where Art Meets Science
Since the focus was on typography, I chose a quite simple color palette of primary red and blue; and used photography for most of the visual aids. The typeface Rockwell Std was selected for the body text & the typeface Avenir was used for the titles & all secondary content. The finished book, which ended up being 60 pages front to back, was printed using an Epson inkjet printer & printed on Mohawk Superfine premium printing paper. The book was also bound through the kettle-stitch binding method & a hard cover was created for it.
