Exhibition Catalog Research - Lindsey Laibinis

I went to the the sixth floor of the Alkek Library and headed over to the over-sized book section. It was overwhelming a bit on how many books I could choose from, but I did manage to find a few that really caught my eye.

The first book I found was called The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes: The Art of Alan Aldridge written by Alan Aldridge himself. This book is a collection of art by the British artist Alan Aldridge. This book showcases both Aldridge's art and his larger-than-life personality. His inimitable and unmistakable work is widely regarded as the main exponent of psychedelic graphic style. The book showcases a vast variety of Aldridge's work such as album covers, advertisements, children's books, and The Beatles lyric books. His work definitely psychedelic and playful to say the least.

The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes is a hardcover book that contains 240 pages of Aldridge's work and information on some of his pieces. The book contained sketches, notes, and other archival information as well as his art. This book is simply a collection of the vast variety of Aldridge's artwork, containing beautiful and extraordinary pieces that is delightful to look at. I would say the audience for this book are designers and artists; just because of all the eye candy is such an inspiration to look at for any aspiring designer or artist. 

 

As you can see from the picture I posted of the spine of the book, the title is in a typeface that is (in my opinion) psychedelic and playful. It seems to be a Slab Serif typeface, which I think suits the overall mood of the book (psychedelic, playful, bold, etc.). When I opened the book, the first couple of pages (pictured above) were dominated by large all caps Sans Serif typefaces (possibly a condensed Trade Gothic or something similar). The table of contents was also accompanied by a Sans Serif typeface which looked a lot like a condensed Trade Gothic.

His overall layout of each and every individual page was fairly clean and consistent with each other. As you can see in the pictures above, he continues to use a bold condensed Sans Serif typeface (which I think is Trade Gothic). He then inserts his art on the opposite page; a very clean and nice approach. 

Although on some pages Aldridge did get playful with his layouts, as shown in the following pictures:

 As you can see these are more playful and fun, which definitely shows Aldridge's style. I especially liked how on one part of the book, the pages folded out from the inside and extended the artwork on the spread even more. This captured (in my opinion) his style for children's books. 

It was extremely inspiring for me to look at this book, especially for the next upcoming project. I never though that exhibition catalogs could be so innovative and fun. I always pictured them in my mind to be simple pictures in a book with type slapped on there in a boring textbook kind of way. I loved how simple, different, and unique each of his pages were. It made each page so interesting to look at, which is something I would love to achieve in my next project.