Book Design Awards Supreme Winner 2010: The Life and Love of Trees
Designer Cameron Gibb
Gerard Reid Award for Best Book: PANZ Book Design Awards 2010
Sponsored by Nielsen Book Services
JUDGES’ COMMENTS
Lewis Blackwell’s The Life & Love of Trees is a combination of breathtakingly beautiful photographs and wonderfully written, elegant and accessible essays. It reaches the highest standards of international design and publishing, and will sit proudly on bookshelves all around the world.
The photographs certainly gave the designer amazing raw material, but having stunning photographs often results in coffee table books with default designs. Here Cameron Gibb has perfectly resolved the deceptively difficult problems posed by the book.
The amount of text per spread varies from nothing to captions, statements and long essays. These had to be unified, whilst fulfilling quite different functions, and the resulting typography is elegant and appropriate – supporting and anchoring rather than competing with the images.
The endpaper motif, which adapts a colour exercise into an evocation of tree trunks, is repeated cleverly throughout – not so often as to be clichéd, but rather as a quiet reinforcement of the subject. And, of course, the photographs themselves are choreographed to allow waves of visual richness to wash over the reader, ebb back and then sweep in again with ever-increasing force.
The cover image works perfectly to signal what the book is all about – and the choice of cover photo typifies Gibb’s quality decision-making. In the end, it is impossible to unpick the design and content from each other. The text and photographs meld into a single, stunning whole, which is what book design ultimately seeks to achieve. The photographs, even with mediocre design, would have delivered a punch. But the overwhelmingly cohesive experience that this book offers can only come as a result of design at the highest level, and the judges ultimately had no hesitation in choosing this as best book.
DESIGNER’S COMMENT
The sheer volume of material presented a significant design challenge. Ultimately, the images proved to
be the heroes and the book’s large format reproduced them to maximum effect. The text appears understated,allowing the images to take centre stage, whilst the pull-out quotes use space to communicate their sometimes provocative nature. Striped colour spectrums, sourced from the very photographs they precede, provide breaks between chapters, visually opening and closing the book.
DESIGNER Cameron Gibb
TITLE The Life & Love of Trees by Lewis Blackwell
PUBLISHER PQ Blackwell/Hachette (NZ)
FORMAT 305mm x 305mm, 200pp,jacketed hardback with printed,debossed case and printed endpapers
