Neff_Catalogs

The first catalog I chose from the library was The Complete Works (So Far) of the Campana Brothers. They're designers, mostly of chairs. The first thing that caught my eye was the cover and it's texture. It has string woven throughout the hard cover and binding of the book giving it a very distinct and eye catching design. Their catalog relies heavily on images and the textures created by those images. I really like how they allow their images to speak for themselves in a lot of cases. They don't muddy up their design with any unneeded text. What text is there, is placed in such a way that it non-obtrusive and gives enough information to the reader where it's purposeful but also allows them to focus more on their works.

Another book I looked at is Up is Up But So is Down.  This is a collection of poetry and literary writings. It's "New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992." This catalogue is obviously heavily text based, but the designer, Brandon Stosuy, did a terrific job of incorporating a lot imagery and illustration to really emphasize the raw, gritty nature of the written words. This catalogue uses a wide variety of texts, sarifs, san sarifs, modern and more traditional typefaces. There are also a lot of handwritten and even collaged words and images to emphasize the wide variety of things being written at the time. 

The third catalogue I want to discuss is Muses by Farid Abdelouahab. This book looks at muses, and the women who have inspired so many great men over the years. The main typeface used in this catalogue is a simple sans serif. But each new muse is introduced in a much more flamboyant, serif typeface. I really like the clean look that this gives as well as the hierarchy. Many of the spreads in this book are half text and half full page photographs. Each layout flows smoothly into the next, giving the it a very clean, cohesive, and easy to follow catalogue. Because most of the people and muses being talked about in this catalogue are from many years ago, the images being used are old and often black and white. So those images, paired with the clean layout and text, really gives the catalogue a vintage and modern feel at the same time. I really like that.

Overall I can learn a lot from all three of these. Each of them have taken into consideration the true nature of it's content and worked that into the overall design of the catalogue. I think that will be very important to consider when creating my own catalogue. Also, the use of imagery paired with text is seamless and flows very naturally together. I believe all three of these are great references.