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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on the design for the Natural Landscape Photography Awards book. It’s a pretty big task with over 200 pages, four essays and lots of captions, but It’s slowly coming together. As part of creating the design, I thought it would be helpful to go through some of the books I have in my office to pick up some ideas. It quickly became apparent that good book design is a rare attribute. In many books, you might not notice because, in place of design, we get simplicity (No, it’s not the same thing!). I think that when most people are working on the design of their books, they err on the side of “make my images as big as possible and get as many in as you can!”. If the reader of your book loves your photographs, I suppose this doesn’t matter too much. But for most photography books, a bit of design to create some breathing space wouldn’t go amiss. We can think of book design as similar to creating a piece of music. Your goal is to create some dynamics as the work progresses. Imagine what a song would sound like if it was just chorus, chorus, chorus repeated all the way through. Instead, throw in some rhythmic and textural changes, the odd patch of quiet, and perhaps a crescendo or a fade out and the experience becomes a lot more interesting. If you’ve got some recommendations for books that you think have been designed well, I’d love to hear about them!
Tim Parkin
Issue 244 PDF
Click here to download issue 244 (high quality, 140Mb) Click here to download issue 244 (smaller download, 89Mb) more
End frame: South Stack Lighthouse, Holy Island, Anglesey 1978, Denis Thorpe
Still photographing in his late eighties from his home in Stockport, England, Denis Thorpe’s landscape images demonstrate the power that derives from locating them within the context of a broad range of other photographic genres. more
Subscribers 4×4 Portfolios
Welcome to our 4x4 feature which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios submitted from our subscribers: Alexey Korolyov, Brian Pollock, Himadri Bhuyan & R. J. Kern more
My Important Way
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Luca Tombolini
The images are the visible part of the experience but what’s hidden in them is the adventure and the magic that I went into. more
QT Luong – Portrait of a Photographer
QT Luong was the first person to photograph all 62 National Parks, an impressive feat on its own right; however, he did so with a large format film camera. more
Sacred Forests
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