Book Design
I love designing books. So much graphic design is destined for the trash, so it's really nice to design something the people will treasure.
This is a selection of the books I've designed in the last few years. Quite a few are about art, which is great because I love art, so it's a pleasure to meet great artists and gallery curators and work with them.
Treads of Silk and Gold exhibition catalogue for the Ashmolean Museum Oxford. 2012.
Special limited edition of Layers, a book about the history of Cork, told through the history of its street names. limited to twenty copies. Quarter leather bound with silver foil on spine. cloth slipcase with map of Cork wrap. Each book has a different combination of cover and endpapers all featuring hand rubbed letters by the author of the book.
Dublin an Urban History is a history of the built architecture of Dublin by prominent architect and historian Niall McCullough. This book is 224 pages long and was designed in a 6 column grid which gave me a lot of flexibility for integration of text and images throughout. We also produced a limited-edition of this book which featured a blind debossed map of Dublin on black cloth for front cover.
Monograph for Irish artist Fergus Martin.
Building a Business is a 224 page book that tells the story of the Sisk Group. This was an in-depth project, which took over two years to complete. I helped search through the archives for images and was heavily involved with the client in finalising the visual content of the book at design stage. This book was casebound in red cloth with blind embossed Sisk logos on the front and back cover, with a dust jacket on top.
Irish Georgian Society: A Celebration was designed to coincide with the society's 50th Anniversary. It turned out to be a lavish production, with gold foil dust jacket, casebound in cloth and over 200 pages of text and images. There was a limited-edition version as well, which was bound in quarter leather and screenprinted cloth, all packaged in a blue cloth slipcase with a blind embossed Irish Georgian Society logo.
The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy was designed for the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (UK), to coincide with an exhibition of the same name at the museum. The design was kept very classical, to tie in with the subject matter. The book features 5 essays and a catalogue section featuring over 100 works.
Glasnevin: Ireland's Necropolis was produced for the newly opened Glasnevin Museum, and features great short histories on the cemetery's most famous occupants. It is 96 pages long and came in hard and paperback editions. We also produced a leather-bound edition which was presented to the Taoiseach at the official opening of the museum.
Not so much a book as a booklet this one, but I'm really happy with the design so I thought I'd include it. This guide was produced for the exhibition Picturing New York at IMMA, Dublin. It was designed to have a classic 20th century feel, and the long tall columns I used remind me of New York. I used american style typeface Franklin Gothic throughout the design.
Representing Art in Ireland is a 224 page coffee-table book that chronicles the history of the Fenton Gallery in Cork, Ireland. The book features short pieces on all of the artists who have shown in the gallery, including prominent Irish artists Louis le Brocquy, Hughie O' Donoghue, Barrie Cooke and my personal favourite, the superb Basil Blackshaw.
