Publishers Design Group | Custom Publishing: Case Study

Custom Publishing: Gallery & Exhibition

CUSTOM PUBLISHING: SHOWCASING ARTISTS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS

Artists, photographers, and galleries can benefit greatly from custom publishing. When produced properly, a book can add credibility and create exposure for an emerging or established artist. Often, an artist or gallery will use the books as premiums for patrons who buy artwork, as well as sell books to gallery browsers. The book then becomes a formal catalog in a prospective collector’s home, usually resulting in a future sale of artwork or photography.

CASE STUDY: Peirano Publishing Program

Publishing Goals: Christine Peirano approached PDG in 1999 to create and produce a catalog of her recent artwork for an upcoming, major art exhibition in Europe. Previous shows were cataloged with a simple, saddle-stitched booklet highlighting the works on display with some text describing the paintings. Christine wanted this one to be more than a catalog and promotional piece.

Primary Consideration: How to create a promotional piece that would deliver insightful content and commentary, while making it enough like a book to be kept in private and public libraries, and to serve as the show catalog and media piece.

Primary Solution: Build value through high-end printing on premium paper with perfect binding (instead of saddle-stitching), applying European design and style to the pages, and including a front section with commentary and articles from international art critics and experts, written in English with German translation alongside.

Client Consultation: Implement the primary solutions stated above. To keep printing costs down, we suggested printing more than enough books for the European art media and gallery patrons. Any books remaining after the show would be made available to the book trade and library wholesalers.

Project Coordination: PDG needed the transparencies and text delivered prior to designing the book and to coordinate the printing and shipping of books from Asia to Germany, within a short timeframe. 

Marketing Approach (pre-launch)
The client handled all marketing and publicity efforts in Europe for the exhibition and the book sales outside of the book trade.

Design & Production Approach
Priorities included implementing European design and style to the pages with artwork displayed on the right hand page of each gallery spread, and a caption describing the work on the left hand page. To accommodate the different size paintings, no bleeds were used. This allowed each painting to be framed with white space in the margins.

Color integrity was of utmost importance to the artist. Output to film, rather than direct digital output to plate, was preferred. Transparencies (4” x 5”) were scanned and film was output prior to proofs and plates.

Publishing Model
Christine Peirano’s book was a Custom Publishing project and was produced primarily for the artist’s own promotional purposes.