CHICAGO
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Designer: Matt Avery
Art director: Jill Shimabukuro
Typefaces: Champion by Hoefler & Frere-Jones and Belizio by The Font Bureau
Imagery: From the Chicago History Museum. The photograph was taken in 1929 by someone from the now defunct Chicago Daily News.
Dear Matt,
Come on!!!
Love, FaceOut Books
What is the book about?
The book is a history of Chicago from its founding up to the present day.
Were there any constraints from the client?
Just that it needed to look like a history book and convey that it was about Chicago. Our marketing staff thought the ideal era to depict would be the early 20th century.
Were there any steps taken before you started designing? Was there a clear working process that led to the final?
Well, there were some false starts, so at the time it didn’t feel like a very direct path from conception to execution. But one of my initial thoughts that did carry through to the final was to take advantage of the one-word title “Chicago” by making an emphatic typographic statement with it. I started by scanning some old type from one of the books we have around the office in order to get some interesting letterforms that also seemed to suggest “Chicago.”
Then I spent a good amount of time searching image archives. I usually enjoy this part of the process, but it’s sometimes too easy to get distracted by unrelated imagery—especially when I get immersed in something like the Library of Congress. My eyes get greedy and I start saving all kinds of images that I run across. Afterward I’ll emerge in a bit of a panic because of how much time has passed and how unfocused my direction is. I was enjoying doing an exhaustive search for this book, though, and I knew that finding the right image was key.
I found a lot of great color images from around the time that color photography was first coming into use. That early Kodachrome look is a lot of fun, and for a while I was sure it was right for this book. But the images I was finding weren’t getting a lot of traction with marketing. What turned out to be the final layout was developed as an alternate approach shortly before our presentation meeting.
Were there any known influences that led to your solution?
I had always admired the stacked type “Tibor” on the spine for Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist. But I didn’t think about adopting that approach for this book until I saw Chicago 1890, which was designed by my coworker Maia Wright and features “Chicago” stacked vertically on the spine. The titles are quite similar, so it didn’t take much imagination to picture that treatment applied to this book. Thanks, Maia!
3.16.10 // Courtney Baker said:
This book is just so classic and lovely, inside and out! The type is eerily beautiful... Great job, Matt!