I had the opportunity today to meet with one of the people who worked on the exhibit catalog for the Walker’s Graphic Design show. My one and only question for him was: “why newsprint?” When I had picked up the magazine the first time, my impression was that it felt cheap, flimsy, and the pages were such printed on such thin and matte paper (gloss should almost be a given for a publication with such an image-based production). Emmet Byrne, Director of Design at the Walker, and co-designer of the catalog, immediately responded with, ‘I could talk for hours about that choice.’
He explained that there were quite a few inspirations working in the catalog, such as the way the pages were laid out in an almost haphazard fashion. He referenced ‘Designing Universal Knowledge,’ a book that had a similar lay out and that this design gives it a very open minded feel, like the reader is supposed to open it to a random page and read it. With this in mind, the paper choice extends the idea further. By printing on newsprint, which was custom cut for the catalog with strict attention paid to the direction of the grain, the catalog gained a flimsy, friendly character. Emmet said their goal was to make it a sort of workhouse book for designers, instead of a coffee table light-reader. He also mentioned that the newsprint paper was also a good solution to having lots of varying quality images. Newsprint, being dull and non-competing with images makes a more cohesive surface compared to high-gloss, which causes white areas to be intense and draws more attention to low quality images.
He pointed out one particularly humorous mistake in the printing process, where the printer had some sort of mishap with the paper roll (possibly dropping it, and hopefully not causing any injuries) and lost track of the paper grain for one segment of the catalog. The segment happened to be the ‘I Am Still Alive’ magazine which exists only in other books and magazines. The magazine is designed by Abake, a London design team. Authors of books or magazines can give the parasite magazine however many pages and they print the ‘I Am Still Alive’ in the middle of that book/magazine. Because of the different paper grain on these pages, they are much stiffer forcing the catalog to always flop open to ‘I Am Still Alive’-creating what looks like an almost shameless promotion of the magazine which lives through others. Another tidbit Emmet offered was about the ink and printing itself. Since they didn’t use gloss paper, they chose to use UV ink, which is ink that dries rapidly when exposed to UV light. Using UV ink stops the ink from seeping into the paper and making images blurry, which has a greater tendency to occur on newsprint. After hearing this interesting overview of the design that went into the catalog I realized I really jumped the gun in deciding that it looked low quality for the high price of $40. Never the less, I found it on Amazon.com for $25, which is very reasonable for the ability to have all the content of the exhibit whenever you need it, on top of essays and original content by the curators.
