In Conversation with Studio Ard
Over the course of that most unpredictable of years – 2020 – the London-based Studio Ard has been a wellspring of creative resolve and luminous ideas. As well as developing Lolli’s art direction, Guillaume Chuard and Daniel Kang Yoon Nørregaard, who founded the studio after graduating from the Royal College of Art, have designed the entire 2020 Lolli cohort, from the meteoric publishing project Tools for Extinction to Amalie Smith’s Marble, translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell. Rosie Ellison-Balaam caught up with the two graphic designers to hear more about their creative process at the intersection of art and literature.
What attracted you to working with Lolli?
Guillaume: It gave us the opportunity to build a complete identity framing Lolli and its art direction, and then designing a series of books within that same frame. As a whole, I think all these elements come together to create something that has gravity; something that is more than simply a book cover. Since we mostly do art books and catalogues, the paperback medium is not something we usually work in, but here we were interested in the books as a collection and its general art direction. I don’t think we will ever be working for a commercial publisher of fiction, as the rules are too restrictive. I mean, you see the mainstream UK covers and it is really quite worrying. You don’t have to give the most obvious things to people.
Daniel: It’s really a matter of not underestimating your audience. Just because the first reaction you get on the cover is prompted by a name and perhaps the face of the author, it doesn’t mean it works all the time. People are actually quite interested in more conceptual designs.
There is an aesthetic coherence to all four books you have created for Lolli, despite differing formats and content. How did you achieve this and were these similarities planned from the beginning? Was realising these more playful texts more attractive than a ‘traditional’ paperback?
Daniel: Yes, I think it was rooted in the format and designs. There is a certain attitude and approach in the design but the books look very different, and the same thing goes for the format. We discussed this difference a lot, asking from the beginning, ‘does it always have to be different?’. It made us think about how the books could cohere without following the same format, the same edit, the same design principles.
Guillaume: We see Lolli as a ‘boutique’ publisher; it is part literature but also art, and I think that’s how we tried to make it feel. Although you can’t drastically change the format of a paperback, we like to explore the physical variations the medium can take. While all the books look different you can still sense a coherent approach behind all of them. I think what we tried to achieve was having an identity while still being flexible, without being corporate or institutional. Now we have just finished the fourth book for Lolli, Marble by Amalie Smith, tr. Jennifer Russell, and it is only now you can start to understand the vision of the collection. Until you see all the books together, the general art direction feels pretty loose; but each book complements each other; they are like the pieces of a puzzle that compose the Lolli landscape.
Daniel: Like with a lot of things we do, we wanted to create an object to render the writing. We want it to gain a presence, to be physical. Due to production costs, it was really a matter of trying to push things; push the production in a way where we can actually create something valuable and not just produce books like a trade publisher would. A lot of the time you see big publishing houses using an image for the cover, and then that cover image is accentuated by a varnish, whereas we used varnish to double the emphasis of the cover texture. You can see this on Marble; the varnish becomes the artwork, rather than an underlining of an already existing image.
Guillaume: When deciding on designs we discussed first with Lolli about what they wanted and the references they had; they had loads of references. Lolli also knew what they didn’t want, which was this idea of using cover templates. We actually decided at the beginning that each cover would be different. Although we are not going to try reinventing the wheel every time; we have our own underlying style principles so quite naturally things tend to look a bit similar, or at least in unity, over time.
Do you feel working on Lolli’s logo helped unite the four books?
Guillaume: For us the logo feels very much like its own entity, because it is strong and solid. We thought that since we wanted to approach book design more artistically, we needed a serious identity to ground it. For a book like Tools for Extinction, there was nothing serious about the design per se; it is quite out there, but then the logo brings it back to something solid. The logo is very different from what we see from other more mainstream literary agencies or publishers. It has a tie to brutalism, which we felt was relevant for Lolli. We hope that people understand that! Of course there is a reason why the traditional literary houses keep their ‘classical’ look, but we think there is also a need to break that and define what is coming up next. We knew it was important to create a bold and edgy look because there is a worry that Lolli can be associated with lollipops or other childish and twee things, whereas it is actually older, coming from an 18th-century composer: Antonio Lolli. It was interesting to go in the opposite direction, to do something really bold and solid to get a nice contrast.
Each cover has a distinctive element, from the iridescent silver strip at the bottom of New Passengers, the striking orange square of The Employees, to the reflective grid of Marble. How did you conceive of these designs?
Daniel: Our general approach has been to make gestures to the narrative, sometimes taking ‘props’ from the story. The design for New Passengers has a likeness to a ticket, so if you have read the book you should really get it. Similarly, with Marble, this design resembles a 3D rendering and thereby accentuates Smith’s exploration of surfaces and 3D models. Whereas with The Employees, you might need more time to read into it. It is not one specific thing that we are trying to put out, it is more a general narrative.
Guillaume: Every time we start by looking at the book as an object with all its sides. This is the most important thing as we are not working in 2D, we are working in 3D. New Passengers has this idea of a massive ticket. Marble has a grid to represent the surfaces of the book. For The Employees, the idea was to have this rigid, corporate feel, with a business card, which would feel like it had just been placed on the cover. It is also a collection of statements, so we liked the idea of making it into a folder. We apply the same principles to all our designs. We very quickly make things in volume, just wrapping covers around a book and seeing how it sits. The thing is with paperbacks, they tend to look quite similar, so we sometimes just take one from the library, print something and wrap it around. Starting to look at how it works.
With Tools for Extinction, did you find this process differed?
Guillaume: For Tools, one of the initial references was really visual – Steve Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog – and the process was really quick. We said, ‘let’s do something fun and something a bit less commercial’ so that’s how it started. The image of the earth from NASA has been compressed to fit the book format, that was the starting point of the idea. The catalogue is from the ’60s and on the front they would always use this image from earth by satellite. Our image of earth is taken the month the book was produced. The little icons on the interior pages were added along the process; each contributor have each their little anamorphic icon, suggestive of different vantage points.
