Luova Photo Book Series

Concept, graphic design, image adjustments and colour separations.

Luova is a Finnish company specialising in fine art printing and framing for artists. Luova Photo Books is a publication series in which visual artists and photographers can publish their side projects.

The concept behind the series was to create small books with soft cloth covers, where the cloth colour varies from one title to another. The books range from approximately 40 to 80 pages. Each edition is limited to 300 copies and includes one collectible pigment print photograph that can be detached from the book along a perforated edge. Every book and collectible print is signed and numbered by the artist. The typefaces used throughout the series are Dolly and Auto by Underware, remaining consistent in every publication. The image layout varies depending on the material. The cover design is always highly minimal, featuring only the name of the artist and the title of the book. The books are digitally printed using either Ricoh or HP Indigo presses and are perfect bound. Each publication contains a text section no longer than two pages.

This project has been especially enjoyable to work on. Digital printing has made book production far more democratic. One major advantage is that the entire edition does not need to be produced at once, since there are no large start-up costs comparable to offset printing. With HP Indigo, the print quality has become exceptionally good. One challenge, however, has been that perfect binding does not work particularly well with full-spread images.

I designed the overall book concept, which was developed together with the editorial group. The publisher of the series is Mikko Raatikainen from Luova.

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