Book design blows up
Where Kindles, e-books and other electronically formatted material have started to replace bookshelves lined with beautifully lettered spines, Barcelona-based graphic designer Miquel Polidano all the more treasures the permanence of the hardbound. Specializing in art books, whose design is just as important yet must not be in competition with the featured artist, Polidano, or Poli as he is called, is a traditionalist who at least for himself believes that designers should subsume their design ego when working on a project or creative brief. “It’s not about the designer’s personality,” he told the roomful of young designers at a recent career talk he gave at the Ayala Museum, hosted by Manila Design Week 2011. “The job of a graphic designer is to relay the message from an intangible state into a physical and visual representation.” The artist books he has created let the artists’ work speak for itself while carrying an overarching design theme that complements and even marries the different and sometimes difficult elements.
Poli’s most recent book, which will be launched in London next week and is the first publication of his new company Triangulo Books, is a slim collection of candid photographs of the late Isabella Blow, who most know as Alexander McQueen’s muse and patron with the crazy hats, but not a lot know that she led a tumultuous life marred by trauma and tragedy, but one devoted to art, artists and aesthetics. The volume presents 32 pictures taken by the artist Stefan Bruggeman, who is known for his conceptual and text-based installation art, one night hanging out in Blow’s house in London in April 2007 (she would die the next month from an overdose of poison).
“This was Isabella as herself, without the usual contrivances of fashion,” Poli describes. Just like a normal night between two friends and wine, Blow plays dress up in Alexander McQueen’s graduation show collection, which she famously bought out and brought home in black plastic bags after a trip to the ATM. The book is interspersed with butterfly and feather illustrations by Marcella Gutierrez that echo the prints and patterns of the outfits. The picture book, somberly elegant in its design with an almost vintage look to its cover, is a small homage to a big, complicated woman, but unlike the other books on Blow published posthumously, this one shows a more vulnerable, intimate side that highlights a very real, personal relationship rather than the glamorously fashionable life she led in public.
