[Kathrin Blatter] I had just returned from a long vacation in Switzerland, jet lagged to high heaven and drunk with the sweetness of never ending alpine glows, when my then boss, Josh Chen of Chen Design Associates, IM’ed me about designing Fingerprint No. 2: The Evolution of Handmade Elements in Graphic Design. Yeah, whatever. Its predecessor, Fingerprint: The Art of Using Handmade Elements in Graphic Design, had been written and designed by Chen Design Associates (CDA), and published by HOW Books a few years prior. I pretended to be reasonably excited about the project, and focused on more urgent matters such as appearing to be awake and alert. However, a meeting soon popped up on the calendar and slowly the post-vacation haze dissipated, and it began to sink in — I was just assigned one of the most creative projects at CDA. Yeah!
It all started with a good idea. Back when Fingerprint 2 was just a twinkle in Josh’s eye, he asked all the designers in the studio to send him cover ideas to explore with the publisher, to see what additional production techniques and processes might be possible for the next edition of Fingerprint, given the success of the first book. I don’t remember how many I’d sent. A gazillion probably. Some crazy, some lame, and a few in between, but one that piqued the publisher’s curiosity was the idea of a cover made by the book buyers themselves. The cover was going to be left blank, a loose sheet of stickers with graphics would be provided and the book buyer would create his/her own cover. The buyer would then select stickers and apply them to the cover. We would have had an endless number of cover variations — imagine how interesting it would be to see them all some day.
That’s where my next journey began; translating the idea into reality. My vacation high subsided and design euphoria took over. No post-vacation depression for me. This project was right up my alley. Fingerprint 2 is a curated showcase by the CDA design team, of the best graphic design work from around the world that uses handmade elements. Creating things with my hands is one of my all-time favorite activities, so by the time I started the design work on Fingerprint 2, I had a huge library of unused, hand-done illustrations to pull from.
While researching and gathering ideas for the book design … click, click … I was drifting through my old artifacts, one computer folder at a time, all neatly categorized yet dormant. It was as if I opened an old trunk of long forgotten treasures, each with its own personality, each with its own story. “What if I resurrected some of these?” I thought.
Ideas are ideas, they live in our imaginations without limits, but translating them into a book design is a very different story. Taking the wide range of variables into consideration, design processes have a mind of their own. After I don’t know how many attempts to make the sticker sheet work, it first moved to the table of contents and finally was scrapped altogether. The sticker idea made room for a beautiful chip board and tactile debosses, combined with silkscreening and offset printing. Reverting to Plan B worked out beautifully. The cover illustration is in fact an old drawing of mine, which needed a few hours of ink work with pens on real paper…sheer bliss.
More and more of my old drawings made their way into the interior. Doodles, birds, flourishes, and dots, lots of dots. But hand drawings alone would have killed the design. The book was meant to be rooted in contemporary times and needed to convey just that. In order to achieve that I juxtaposed the hand drawn elements with clean vector elements. The typography was kept very clean to not overpower the featured work. And I even got to use one of my favorite typefaces, Baksheesh, and combined it with a little bit of DIN and Ibis.
Kathrin Blatter is a graphic designer in San Francisco and graduate of the Academy of Art University. Exactly one year ago, she took the plunge to open up her own design studio called Rabbit Factor. In the meantime she has also taken on the challenge of teaching a couple of courses at her alma mater; experimental type and packaging, both are her design loves. “I get all giddy for the final class. It’s immensely gratifying to see what the students are capable of producing by the end of the semester,” she says about teaching. When she’s not out and about doing “designy” things, she is charging her mountain bike through mud and rocks, or dancing until the cows come home…but only when nobody is watching.
I can’t keep my fingers off of this book. The work, the design, the artifact itself is so luscious it begs you to touch it. Kathrin, you make us very proud.
Mary Scott