Catalogs: Michael Johnson

Indian Contemporary Art

This book was about Contemporary Indian Art and showed the diversity of art across different regions of India.  It's aim is to show how populous and different the painters of contemporary India are.  I was first attracted to this book because of the bright cover and Futura typeface on the cover.  The page layouts gave a lot of room for the type to breathe and it made it pleasant to read through.  Not too much type was put on any page, especially when images were present.  I believe the typeface inside is also Futura, with a bold and bold oblique version used for image descriptions.

The Art of Modernism

 

This book was about exactly what it sounds like, modern art. Here is another book I was attracted to because of Futura, this time I noticed it on the spine, where a bold yellow stands out especially well on a blue cover. The cover was just an embossed ALL-CAPS title that is somewhat hard to read. I found the inside a bit less interesting because it used an old-style serif typeface that seemed expected for a history book.  It did have mostly art history, so it fit with the content, but they could have used a different typeface for the different sections or header and footer type.

Plain Pictures

Here is another book who's title describes it's content well. This consisted of images of the American prairie. It has an interesting bold sans-serif typeface on it's cover and it repeats it in the different section headers of the book. It uses an old-style serif typeface for the content and a bold old-style serif for the image descriptions.  i was drawn to the wide variety of page layouts.  Probably more than a dozen different layouts are inside this book. At times it seems random, but the layout fits the image  and type well and makes it pleasant to read.

From all of these I saw different layouts that worked well with the content they dealt with.  The first book had a strict layout that gave the type plenty of room and made it feel more like an art book.  The second book had a more novel-like feel with the type layout and lack of diversity. The third book had a ton of diversity in page layouts and felt more like an art history textbook when one read it.  All of them had very different feelings when one turned through them, but they all worked well for the content at hand.  I really learned how many directions someone can go with a book layout.