Our play piece, Intelligent Design, directly influenced this project for Wright, the premier modern auction house in Chicago. Wright needed a way to showcase over 6,000 books (and a paragraph description for each) that detailed each piece in the collection and was efficient to produce. After viewing Intelligent Design, Richard Wright connected the lines between our experiment and his needs: why not automate the design process to save time and paper cost?

The information grid is appropriately dense, fitting all 6,000 descriptions on 16 pages. Six hundred “lot” collages of the 6,000 book covers were created, styled and placed through programming. The book closes with an expressive “index,” using a variety of typefaces found on a typical collector’s bookshelf. Books on Modernism served as a program for the event and a record of the sale.

“Fabulous display of information. The scale and depth of this piece is remarkable.”