Designers Talk about Chinese Book Design

In the digital age, due to the challenges faced by a wide range of new media, the once mainstream media status of books has become a memory. Faced with the threat of e-reading, even the value of books as a material form has been shaken. It is precisely because of this anxiety that “there is no skin, hair will be attached”, but bookbinding has become more important as an independent existence of art. Books are created in format, paper, color, illustration, layout, etc. Artistic personalities have assumed responsibility for the demise of books as material existence as never before.

In the digital age, due to the challenges faced by a wide range of new media, the once mainstream media status of books has become a memory. Faced with the threat of e-reading, even the value of books as a material form has been shaken. It is precisely because of this concern that bookbinding has become more important as an independent existence of the arts. The artistic features created by books, paper, color, illustrations, layouts, etc. have assumed the books as material existence as never before. Is it the responsibility of extinction?

Gaps: Misunderstandings

At present, with the continuous improvement of the printing process and the binding process, the “book face” in China has indeed reached a certain height in terms of exquisiteness and luxury. Stamping film is not uncommon, sprinkle "gold powder", add hard skin, do cover with PVC material, use mahogany to do letter sets and so on. At the same time, due to the advent of the era of "reading pictures," books with few illustrations or illustrations have become heterogeneous, and books on the shelves are colorful. However, experts from China's well-known binding artists, Tao Xuehua, deputy director of the China Printing Association, and Lu Jingren, a professor at the Fine Arts Department of Tsinghua University, pointed out that the book assembly industry in China has entered multiple misunderstandings, and the gap with the international community is still very clear.

Many experts said that the gap between the single language format and the international level is most obvious. This is mainly a matter of concept. China's designers tend to focus on cover design and pay insufficient attention to layout design. This is mainly reflected in two aspects. One is that the words are piled full of papers without a word. On the other hand, they are going to the opposite extreme. Excessive use of illustrations leads to overfitting. The more fancy the book publishers do, the more full the layout is, and the more images are used as the standard. The illustrations and contents of some books are completely non-existent, and some, even if they are in line with the content, have severely affected the reading due to the excessive placement or improper positioning of the pictures.

Lu Jingren said that the blind pursuit of popularity by publishers has no professional aesthetic vision. This is of course a cause of this situation. Deviations in the concept of book designers in China cannot be ignored. Book design is "dancing with the pipa," and the combination of sensuality and rationality is demanding. The professional education pursued by more than 90% of the book-laying staff in China pursues a perceptual art. Therefore, many designers will ignore the identity of the book as a carrier of information and simply highlight their own artistic personality, with novelty and fancy as the United States. According to the introduction of Lu Jingren, the China Central Academy of Arts and Crafts had set up the design of book binding design in the 1950s, but for various reasons, it was discontinued in the 1990s. At present, there is no book designing major in our country's colleges and universities. The foreign specialized book design education has been quite mature. There is an editorial in this professional discipline setting, which helps to grasp the relationship between rationality and sensibility in book binding.

Tao Xuehua pointed out that follow-up and plagiarism are also very serious problems at present. Once there is a strong personality style, other books of the same type will immediately appear in the same costume. For example, the “Tibetan Leather Book” published by China Youth Publishing House has a nearly square shape, the edges of the book are all painted in black, and the book cover is glued into a whole, and the unique style of the inner text layout with a large number of arrows has won the market. Almost all tourism books have begun to imitate.

Expecting: Book Morphology

Professor Tsinghua University's Academy of Fine Arts and “The First Person in China's Book Design” Lu Jingren now advocates a change from the traditional “bookbinding” (book binding) to “book design” (book design), and proposes an original book form. learn". In an interview with the Postco reporter, he said that a truly good book package is not only an interpretive mark, a narrow description of the text, but also an outer package. It should capture various elements of the book's connotation, find spaces that match the theme, and artistic expression. Form, reconstruct or even increase the rhythm, level and expressiveness of the text of the book. “The design of books should reflect editing capabilities. Designers act like directors, mobilize fonts, images, paper, space, open source, white space, virtual reality, grayscale processing, black and white contrasts, and other factors to jointly interpret a play. Beyond the meaning of decoration."

For instance, Lu Jingren said, for example, he recently designed the "Mei Lanfang Biography", and the material received was the performance of Mei Lanfang's life and some stills. When designing, he considered that the book actually reflected Mei Lanfang's dramatic stage and life stage. He borrowed more pictures of Mr. Mei from the descendants of Mei Lanfang and reorganized it according to this idea. Text. An incision is made at the cut of the spine, turning right is the starting point of reading Mei's life stage, and turning left is the beginning of the play stage. "This is what I seek. Design must not only reflect, but also pursue extension and enhance the realm of the Chinese language."
Zhang Zhiwei, one of the designers of the last “The Most Beautiful Book in the World,” the only Gold Medal winner “Mei Lanfang (Tibetan) Drama Historical Pictures Collection”, and his well-known graphic designer Zhang Zhiwei expressed that the realm pursued by him is “invisible to the elephant”. "Big" is a high artistic summary. "Xiang" is the content of the book. The so-called unmarked design. In the content-determined form, taking into account the differences in the aesthetic tastes of readers of different books such as social sciences, serious literature, and youth literature, the aesthetic taste of the public is consciously higher than that of the readers, and it plays a role in guiding the aesthetics of the public.

Status: Breakthrough in overall design

During the “May 4th” period, Lu Xun, the vanguard figure of China’s modern decoration art, thoroughly tried and finished the traditional Chinese book binding methods such as compilation, roll-in-paper, cyclone, disassembly, butterfly, back-loading, and thread-loading. Discard and learn from the West in terms of binding, typesetting, typeface, and format. The Chinese book-binding industry, which has since evolved in imitation, has been unable to achieve the same level of overall concept and technology as the West.

When interviewed by Tao Xuehua, a well-known framing artist and deputy director of the China Edition Coiffure Art Committee, he recalled the changes in the level of Chinese bookbinding as reflected in the 5th National Costume Art Exhibition from 1979 to the present. She said that in 1959, China held its first national art exhibition of framing, which played a significant role in promoting the development of this art category. Since then, the "Cultural Revolution" has been interrupted. In 1979, it was resumed, mainly based on "broken." The books of the "Cultural Revolution" period were a "red ocean". In 1979, a large number of black and gray books appeared and the illustrations gradually returned to a rich state. In 1986, the third session began to create prosperity. In 1991, the fourth cover design made a big breakthrough, but the layout design was still relatively simple. In 1998, the fifth edition of the cover, the layout of the text, and the drafting format all exhibited the concept of design.

The sixth national attire art exhibition that will hold an awards ceremony in December this year has achieved a breakthrough in the overall design. The aesthetic continuities of the various components and partial designs of many books have been harmonized with the content of the books. At the same time, it began to pay attention to the beauty of the craftsmanship of paper materials, and the sense of local cultural aesthetics began to return.

Tao Xuehua revealed that in the past, the design of the National Costume Art Exhibition included three aspects of cover design, layout design, and overall design. In view of the overall concept of international acceptance in China, the next review may cancel cover design and layout design. Leave an overall design award. =-

Book Design Network