For Each Minute – Sixty-Five Seconds

13/03/2022 19:15 Leave a Comment

Artist	Niko Luoma
Concept design	Juha Nenonen and Niko Luoma
Graphic design and typesetting	Juha Nenonen, Bigger Splash
Reproductions	Petri Kuokka, Aarnipaja
Publisher	Hatje Cantz, Berlin Germany
Size	Portrait 25 x 30,5 cm
Content	184 pages, 65 colour artworks, 72 workbook images and sketches, six B/W artworks (on text pages) and six reproduced artworks of other artists
Language	English
Texts	Niko Luoma, Timothy Persons, Lyle Rexer and Duncan Wooldridge
Typeface	Dolly Pro and Auto Pro by Underware
Paper	Arctic Volume Highwhite 150 g, Munken Pure Rough 90 g (text pages), Favini Lunar mini silver 120 g (dust-jacket) and Munken Pure 400 g (cover)
Binding	Swiss softcover with black thread. American dust-jacket poster as cover
Printing	UV offset 4/4, text pages 1/1 (black), FM- screen, spot varnish on artworks and glossy UV varnish as effect on 8 pages
Printing and binding	Livonia Print, Riga Latvia
Year	2021
ISBN	978-3-7757-4689-2

Concept design, graphic design and typesetting.

For Each Minute – Sixty-Five Seconds is truly a magnificent one of a kind art book. It is full of highly thought out small details and the printing quality is simply superb. The book is a Tour de Force of book concept design by Bigger Splash.

For Each Minute – Sixty-Five Seconds is artist’s book that presents works from Niko Luoma’s Adaptations series. The photo works in the series are based on masterpieces of art history – paintings made by other artists – which Luoma has used as a starting point and made his own versions of them using his own unique working method. These abstract photographs are created according to a precise advance plan with hundreds of exposures on 4 x 5 inch film with field camera. The working process is meditative and slow, and this slowed time is also indicated in the title of the book For Each Minute – Sixty-Five Seconds.

In addition to the works from the Adaptations series, the monograph contains lot of sketches, reference images and spreads from the artist’s notebooks. The book includes an interview with Lyle Rexer and Niko Luoma, an essay by Duncan Wooldridge, and a foreword by Timothy Persons. Luoma’s self-written comments about his sketches, works and his own working process in general are placed at the end of the book.

The content paper of the book is bulky and bright Arctic Volume Highwhite. All of the artworks are displayed on white background, while a black background is used on the sketch pages. Spot varnish has been used on top of the artworks to increase the gloss and contrast. The book has four foldout / gatefold spreads. Two of them open only to one side and the other two open to both directions. The latter uses a glossy spot UV-varnish as an effect. The text pages with reference images are printed on thin Munken Pure Rough with 1/1 black colour. Thanks to the Swiss binding, the spreads open beautifully completely flat. The use of black thread in the binding is another special detail. It is a small detail but suits perfectly for this book.

The book has a soft cover with Munken Pure rough paper printed with black ink only. The actual double-sided American dust-jacket cover is wrapped around the Munken cardboard. One can detach it from the book and open it as a poster. It has been printed with oxidation-drying inks on Italian Favini Lunar Mini Silver paper. The flaps of the dust-jacket entail many sketches and archival images and Mary Oliver’s poem The Uses of Sorrow serves as an introduction to the book. Dust-jacket contains also author’s introductions and three artist inscriptions. The inside of the dust-jacket is a hidden gem that shows a collage of inspirational images and objects that Luoma has arranged on his studio floor.

The book was published by Hatje Cantz in the summer of 2021.

Museum Meditations

11/10/2021 14:59 Leave a Comment

Artist	Jorma Puranen
Publisher	Jorma Puranen / Aboa Vetus Ars Nova Museum Turku
Size	200 × 280 mm
Content	64 pages / 40 images
Language	English and Finnish
Texts	Alistair Hicks
Fonts	Nexus serif Pro, Nexus Sans Pro and Gotham Thin
Paper	Arctic Volume Ivory 150 g, front and end papers: Geltex silks 115 g
Binding	Sewn binding, hard cover
Printing	UV offset printing
ISBN	978-952-5820-23-2

Concept of the publication, design and layout, edit and sequencing and taking care of the production.

Museum Meditations is a small publication made in conjunction with Jorma Puranen’s exhibition at the Aboa Vetus Ars Nova Museum in Turku, Finland.

For this book I used bulky yellowish Arctic Volume that has a nice uncoated feeling but still allows a superb printing quality. Although the paper is already warm in tone it still accepts a warm printed background tone on every page. As a contrast to that I used dark blue Geltex Silks for the front and end papers. The book begins with a three spread collage-type selection of small illustrations and photographs followed by larger photographic works.

The format of this book is quite close to A4-size still being a bit smaller and shorter in size. Although being so close to the most used paper format the feeling of the book is unusual; it feels surprisingly narrow and tall.

The essay text Path North by Alistair Hicks is set with Nexus Serif font that has a relatively large point size. It is beautiful and easy to read.

Observing Eye

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Artist	Sanna Kannisto
Publisher	Sanna Kannisto / Hatje Cantz
Size	Portrait 250 × 290 mm
Content	144 pages, including one 8-page gatefold 76 images
Language	English
Texts	Barbara Hofmann-Johnson
Fonts	Minion Pro and ITC Espirit
Paper	Arctic Volume white 150 g, front and end papers: Geltex silks 115 g
Binding	Sewn binding, hard cover. Brillianta fabric cover with debossed image on the front cover.
Printing	UV offset
ISBN	978-3-7757-4791-2

Concept of the publication, design / layout, supervision of the printing work and taking care of the production.

Observing Eye is third monograph book from Finnish visual artist Sanna Kannisto. This book concentrates on Sanna’s bird series that she has been shooting in Finland, Russia, Italy and Costa Rica.

Sanna’s working method is very unique. She is an artist who’s work lands interestingly between art and nature photography. She shows her works in galleries and museums but her subjects are familiar from nature photography. For this book she has been working together with scientists at the bird stations. The birds are captured for scientific purpose and ringing and after the research has been done Sanna can take photos of the birds in her small portable field studio. In the white plexiglass studio birds are isolated from their natural habitats for a short time. Sanna pays close attention to how her photographs are composed: She plans and selects carefully all the attributes, props, branches etc and sometimes she might do a lot of work in compositing the images later in Photoshop. The end result is partly portrait, partly still life image and partly nature photography.

In some images she uses black curtains on left and right side of the studio that gives theatrical “stage look” for the images. The bird (sometimes many of them) certainly is the protagonist of the scene. What makes these photographs different from conventional nature photography is the close proximity. There is always a close encounter between the photographer and the bird – the bird observes and reacts to the photographer and vice versa. It is very rare to see a bird from so close distance in real life. We wanted to take advantage of this and keep photographs as large as possible so that the birds in the book are quite close to their real life-size.

Most of the birds she photographs are migratory birds that are on their way to South or North in spring or Autumn. One detail that is not immediately visible in the images are the rings that the birds have in their legs. These birds are not just any wild birds: they are part of research and they have been “named”. They are free birds but have become part of the scientific “culture”. The naming of the works also refer to this. Usually the works are named after the Latin species name. Sometimes Sanna uses another type of naming, that might be more poetical or refer to the outside of the photograph (like Silent Spring or Approach of Winter).

For the book we wanted to have classical cloth cover. We selected pale green Brillianta fabric that has very nice natural haptic feel. As paper stock we used bulky Arctic Volume paper that gives good printing quality but feels pleasant for the eye and hand.

Observing Eye was short-listed on Photobook of the year 2020 -prize in Finland and it got silver medal in Deutscher Fotobuchpreis (German Photo Book Prize) 20/21 on series of Conceptual Artistic Photo-Picture Collection (Konzeptionell künstlerischer Fotobildband).

Villa Frenckell

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Client	Carcotec Oyj
Size	Landscape 225 × 285 mm
Content	200 pages
Language	English, Finnish and Swedish (separate editions)
Texts	Rose-Marie Peake
Paper	Munken Lynx 130 g by Arctic Paper / Papyrus + colorit by Antalis
Binding	Hard cover, French binding. Foil embossing.
Printing	Offset

Concept of the publication, design / layout, photography, image adjustments and CMYK-separations, supervision of the printing work and making Swedish and English language editions.

This book tells the history of an iconic building; Villa Frenckell, located in Helsinki and now owned by Cargotec. It brings you the story of the house itself as well as the family that owned it and how it became the property of Cargotec.

The inspiring text is written by Rose-Marie Peake. The book has lots of beautiful illustrations, historical data as well as recent photographs. These recent photographs were taken by Juha Nenonen. The book was produced in three editions: Finnish, Swedish and English.

The book is a hard cover with French binding and a bookmark ribbon. Two paper stocks were used: the content is on uncoated Munchen Lynx 130 g by Papyrys and the appendices are printed on coffee brown Colorit 120 g by Antalis. As one can expect from a historical document one can find a lot of reference material at the end of the book; notes, list of sources and literature, appendices and index. I truly enjoy working with that material!

The House of Poets

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Artist	Timo Kelaranta
Publisher	Kehrer Verlag Germany
Size	Size landscape 300 × 240 mm
Content	116 pages / 106 colour illustrations
Language	English
Texts	Timo Kelaranta, Auli Leskinen, Timothy Persons
Binding	Sewn binding, hard cover
ISBN	978-3-86828-517-8

Concept & graphic design of the publication.

Timo Kelaranta is a famous Finnish photo artist. Timo works doing still lifes that he then photographs. Timo’s working method is very serial. He works in a small scale and very often he uses coloured papers, bends and rolls them and makes still lifes from those. As an outcome he makes colorful abstract images. For this book we wanted to present these works in a grid format.

Inside the book there is smaller size folio that is bound inside to book. It contains Timo’s wife Auli’s text. It is kind of a small personal letter where I used uncoated paper stock. In the end of the book there is an index that shows all the works as small thumbnail images.

Avannaa

14:55 Leave a Comment

Artist	Tiina Itkonen
Publisher	Kehrer Verlag Germany
Size	Landscape 300 × 240 mm
Content	104 pages / 45 images
Language	English
Texts	Jean-Michel Huctin, Pirkko Siitari
Binding	Sewn binding, hard cover
ISBN	978-3-86828-512-3

Design and layout, edit and sequencing.

Tiina Itkonen is a Finnish photographer famous for her photographs from Greenland. This is already second book I made for her. Avannaa is full of amazing superb quality panoramic images of North Greenland Greenlandish landscapes. In these images blue skies and ice shines everywhere.

Wide panoramic views are challenging for the book format. Landscape formats in general have many disadvantages in books but in this case it was almost a must to use wide landscape format. Patric Söderlund started the book concept design and I finished it doing lot of work with image seqencing. I wanted to make continious flow of whole spread images with 20 mm margins. That is interrupted every now and then with some single page images. In the end there are essays by Jean-Michel Huctin and Pirkko Siitari.

And Time Is No Longer an Obstacle

14:54 Leave a Comment

Artist	Niko Luoma
Publisher	Hatje Cantz
Size	250 × 305 mm
Content	136 pages / 60 images
Language	English
Texts	Lyle Rexer, Daniel Marzona and Timothy Persons
Fonts	John Downer’s Vendetta by Emigre
Paper	Galaxi Keramik 170 g
Binding	Sewn binding, hard cover with dust jacket
ISBN	978-3-7757-3339-7

Concept & graphic design of the publication.

Niko Luoma’s first monograph presents his unique abstract analogue photography. The book consists of four bodies of work: Motives, Cronos, Kairos and Symmetrium.

The book presents Niko’s great works in a simple and beautiful way without being just another “American photobook”. Aim was to make a minimalistic book with a little bit of twist. Smaller images are placed low on the page, that is very small detail but makes a big difference and gives nice impression. The sequencing in this book works really well too. John Downer’s Vendetta font has lots of small beautiful details. It looks unique and works perfectly with the book concept.

Detail of the work Symmetrium #2 fills the whole dust jacket. It is a bright work that flickers with complementary colours red and green. The hard cover under the dust jacket is matt black with shiny spot varnish on text and the fly leaf papers are mid grey. I love this combination.

The book looks really good and it is a must for the fans of abstract photography.

Art of Design

14:53 Leave a Comment

Client	Rockplan Ltd
Size	landscape 245 × 300 mm
Content	176 pages
Language	English and Finnish (separate editions)
Fonts	Tobias Frere-Jones / Gotham
Binding	Sewn binding, hard cover
Printing	Offset

Concept of the publication, design / layout, architectural and portrait photography, image adjustments and CMYK-separations and supervision of the printing work.

Rockplan is a Finnish design agency specializing in the underground construction and spaces. This book takes an exceptional closer look into different areas of designing process and possible challenges on the field. The main content is not the texts but in the visual material – illustrations and their captions. The book contains lots of photographs, sketches, tables, technical drawings and maps. The projects are presented and the texts are written by their own experts. Rockplan CEO Jarmo Roinisto had a vision and courage to order this highly ambitious and unusual coffee table book. The whole project was very long-sighted and wise decision from the company. For this book we wanted to make a book that is not advertisement but something more valuable, something that the receiver wants to keep in the bookshelf forever. Art of Design is not just promotion of the corporate work but it truly gives a deeper look on their field in general and of course on the vast variation on different world class projects they have realized during the past few years. Rockplan distributed this book widely to their stakeholders. Is there any better way to promote your company?

For the format we selected large landscape format with hard cover. For the large page size it was easy to build interesting spreads with many smaller illustrations and captions as well as to show very large and impressive images with lots of details.

Tobias Frere-Jones’ brilliant Gotham font family was used as it is very precise, beautiful and convincing. It is a font that many presidential candidates have used in their campaigns in US because it gives image that is often connected with trustworthiness and expertise. We wanted to use energetic bright green colour as PMS-ink in the headlines and captions. Overall there are lot of bright colours in this book which is quite unusual for the field. Juha took many of the architectural images and graphic designer and illustrator Milena Huhta was also along designing the book concept.

Fastems FMS Taydellä teholla

14:53 Leave a Comment

Client	Fastems Oyj
Size	Portrait 220 × 283 mm
Content	200 pages
Language	Finnish
Binding	Sewn binding, Hard cover with matt lamination and hotfoil embossed text.
Printing	Offset printing CMYK + 1 pms

Concept and graphic design, layout, photo adjustments and CMYK-separations, supervision of the printing work.

FMS means Flexible Manufacturing System and Fastems is a Finnish company operating worldwide designing and producing intelligent factory automation solutions mainly for metal cutting industry. This book tells about contemporary automated factory and storage systems and how they have developed during the past 30 years. The main idea behind the book is to showcase their customers automation solutions. Idea to bring corporate customers to the highlight and let them speak for you is brilliant! There is nothing better than satisfied customer why wants to share their good experiences.

The book is printed in offset with 4/4 CMYK + 1 PMS blue metallic colour. The technological metallic blue ink is used in headlines and captions as well as in the full bleed images that start every new chapter. No two columns start on the same line and the column heights differ on spreads. This gives very nice visual alternation to the body text and at the same time it mimics the visual forms of factory storage systems. Also, the images vary in size and how they are placed on pages. I’m very happy about the look of this book. It is a corporate book with a fresh identity. Readability and legibility are on great level and those are always my greatest concern when setting the type.

Helsinki photography biennial

14:52 Leave a Comment

Client	Union of Artist photographers
Size	Landscape 210 × 245 mm
Content	132 pages
Language	Trilingual: Finnish, English and Swedish
Binding	Sewn binding, soft cover with lamination
Printing	Offset

Concept & graphic design.

This is a catalogue of the Helsinki Photography Biennial. Catalogue presents all the artists in a biennial according to the exhibition venues. Every artist has democratically two pages and one spread.

The catalogue is multi lingual that is always a challenge. In general I like to make books as separate editions for every language. This is because people usually read only one language. If there are texts in more than one language, then these parts are useless for this particular reader and it is not an optimal situation. But sometimes one has to make a compromise on this. And exhibition catalogues are practical tools for temporal use anyway.

Väestösuojien rakentamisen historia ja käsikirja 1927–2016 / History & handbook of the Civil shelter building and design

14:51 Leave a Comment

Client	Pekka Rajajärvi
Size	Portrait 245 × 300 mm
Content	432 pages
Texts	Pekka Rajajärvi
Paper	Galerie Art Volume 130 g
Binding	Sewn binding, hard cover with soft touch lamination

Concept and graphic design, layout, tables, charts and diagram design, photo adjustments and CMYK-separations and supervision of the printing work.

The author of this book, Pekka Rajajärvi, was the head authority in Finland on the field of civil shelter building and design regulations. He is a man who know the most of Finnish civil shelters and their building regulations. This book is his legacy that he wanted to make to share and store his knowledge to this field. It is one of a kind book in the world.

The book is massive. It has 432 pages full of tables, diagrams, charts and regulations. There are plenty of images and a very long review on the history of civil shelter building in Finland and also round the world.

Because there is lot of text, we wanted to make this book large and avoid fully packed pages. There are wide margins, and lot of air for the elements to breath. We wanted to use bright pink and cyan colours to give counterbalance for the heavy regulations text. The paper is bulky Galerie Art Volume 130 g. It feels great to fingers, it is easy to read and pleasant to the eye and it enables good printing quality.

An USB-memorystick was made to accompany the book and it contains all the regulations as PDF and Word-documents. This book is a must for the people doing anything on this field.

HVK ruokapalveluopas

14:50 Leave a Comment

Client	National Emergency Supply Agency NESA / Huoltovarmuuskeskus
Size	Portrait 175 × 248 mm
Content	88 pages
Language	Finnish and Swedish (e-PDF version only)
Fonts	Beau Sans
Paper	Munken Polar 120 g by Arctic Paper
Binding	Sewn binding, soft cover with flaps and lamination
Printing	Offset + e-PDF
ISBN	978-952-5608-37-3 printed
ISBN	978-952-5608-38-0 PDF

Concept of the publication, design / layout, photography, image adjustments and CMYK-separations.

NESA is a Finnish state own organization that takes care security of supply and ensures a functioning society under all circumstances. This handbook is made for local authorities and communes to help preparing food services for citizens under any circumstances.

Because this is a handbook we wanted to make it small in size and easy to use. The book has lots of charts, tables and diagrams. For the paper we used Munken Polar 120 g uncoated natural paper that is pleasant to hand and eye. The soft cover has soft touch lamination. The main colour is natural forest green. Typography is set with NESA’s nice corporate type Beau Sans. All the photographs are taken and all the design work and colour separations are done by Juha Nenonen.

Luova Photo Book Series

08/10/2021 14:26 Leave a Comment

Client	Luova Helsinki
Size	Portrait 165 × 215 mm
Language	English with slip-in folio of translations in Finnish
Fonts	Auto and Dolly by Underware
Paper	Paper varies depending on book, Galerie Art Volume 130 g, Arctic Volume or Scandia 2000 smooth white. Every book contains one collectible image printed on Museo Silver Rag paper.
Printing	Digital printing
	Limited edition of 300 copies

Concept & graphic design

Luova is a small Finnish company that makes printing and framing for the artists. Luova photo books is a series where visual artists and photographers can publish their side projects. The concept behind this series is to make small books with soft cloth cover where the cloth colour varies on every book. The page number is between 40–80. Every book has limited edition of 300 containing one collectible pigment ink photograph that is possible to tear off from the book along the perforation. Every book and collectible image is signed and numbered by the artist. The fonts are Dolly and Auto by Underware and they are always the same. The image layout may vary depending on the material. On the cover there is always only the name of the artist and the name of the book. The book is printed digitally with either Ricoh or HP indigo. The books are glue bound. In every book there is text that is maximum 2 pages long.

This project has been fun to make. Digital printing is now more democratic way to print books. One big advantage is that you do not have to make the whole edition at once because there are no big expences to start the printing work like in offset printing. In HP Indigo the quality starts to be really good. Challenge has been that the glue binding does not work so well with full spread images. This might be fixed in the future when we might be able to do these as thread bound.

Black and White Movies

Mika Taanila
44 pages
Text Olaf Möller
ISBN 978-952-5755-05-3

Peel-apart

Antti Nylén
76 pages
Text Antti Nylén
ISBN 978-952-5755-06-0

Ruutinkoski

Martti Jämsä
62 pages
Text Leena Kuumola
ISBN 978-952-5755-07-7

Tunteita ja Tunnelmia tunturimaja Ylläksellä

14:12 Leave a Comment

Client	Adelec Hiljahousing
Photography	Niclas Warius
Size	228 × 228 mm
Language	Finnish
Fonts	Vendetta by Emigre
Paper	Munken Lynx 170 g by Arctic Paper / Papyrus, Invercote creato matt by Antalis for the cover.
Binding	Laminated softcover with flaps

Concept of the publication, design / layout, photography, image adjustments and CMYK-separations.

This is a nice project about private villa in Northern Fell Lapland. The idea of the book was to document the comprehensive design of the villa. All the textiles and even the tableware were designed custom made just for this villa.

Because it was very much aboit material, textiles and feelings I wanted to give this book nice soft and haptic feel. Content paper is uncoated Munken Lynx 170 g and the cover is Invercote creato matt. The book has a softcover with lamination. The type is set with John Downer’s beautiful Vendetta by Emigre fonts. Very nice project to do.