Tom Friedman oh too o three

The objective of this book was to re-create an experience of viewing the 2003 exhibition of Tom Friedman’s work.

The book’s jacket presented the challenge of how to encapsulate that experience as well. After some consideration, the decision was made to use the outer jacket to represent Mr. Friedman’s creative process “macrocosmically,” with the inner jacket evoking his “microcosm.” Hence, the entire outer jacket (including flaps) consists of a colored-pencil drawing containing every piece in the exhibition; the inner jacket shows a close-up of an abstract painting he did on a piece of string. There is no typography superimposed on this jacket. The only words are Mr. Friedman’s notes in the drawing itself. The audience for this book is that of the numerous collectors of his work, as well as the wider audience of anyone who picks it up. A number of comps were made, several of which incorporated enlarged and cropped images from the book’s interior. The title was used in initial stages, but a process of elimination brought us to see the wisdom of the image-only solution. The cliché of a picture being worth a thousand words is what we were after. As stated above, it seemed the inner/outer (macro/micro) solution was the best choice for this jacket. The image(s) really seem(s) to speak louder because of (and not despite) the absence of a title.