This book is a catalog for a Denver Art Museum exhibition of contemporary Asian art from the collection of Vicki and Kent Logan.

Exhibition catalogs are fairly straightforward design assignments. The kinds of material presented—essays, plates, list of works, and the like—are similar from catalog to catalog. The challenge for me is in the details of the presentation: what combination of typographic and design decisions can lead to a book that complements the personality of the subject matter? With this project, I was struck by how the subject matter of the art concerns Asian themes while the visual vocabulary used by the artists is that of Western Modernism, resulting in works that are both familiar and unfamiliar. And so I decided to try to pursue a similar approach with the design and typography.

For the text, I chose Eplica, a typeface with a beautiful texture and a plethora of ligatures. I used the ligatures to give the text a slightly unfamiliar texture. For extended quotations, I used Tarzana, whose tone is similar to Eplica, but whose texture is different. Figure and plate information are run vertically, and use a number of typefaces. Artists’ names are set in August, which I liked because of its subtly unconventional distribution of weight within the characters.

In his opening essay, Kent Logan refers to the significant transformations occurring in Chinese society. This gave me the idea of using silver ink to suggest a kind of veiling and unveiling of the art. The opening spreads for the essays use details of paintings that are obscured by the metallic ink; the title type punches through to reveal details. The cover, reproducing a detail of Yu Youhan’s terrific Mao Decorated, is wrapped in a jacket of vellum printed with silver. Removing the jacket is more surprising than simply having Mao on the cover—it gives what is on the surface a Pop presentation of Mao, a hint of the political overtones that painting Mao has for an artist of Yu Youhan’s generation.

“It is all about the subtle color use—it calmly leads you in. Good presentation for the collection.” Isabel Warren-Lynch