BLENDED WORLDS
In the fall of 2024, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory mounted a collection of experiments to reimagine our place in the cosmos—to help us create a new relationship with the natural world, from Earth to distant galaxies and potential life beyond. They developed these experiments with a multi-disciplinary team of artists, scientists, technologists, designers and other curious minds. The results were shown at the Glendale Library’s historic Brand Library & Art Center location as part of that year’s Pacific Standard Time series sponsored by the Getty Foundation.
The Glendale Library Arts & Culture Trust and the Glendale Arts and Culture Commission decided to commemorate the project with a companion book, which is where I come in.
The book contains 21 projects. They range from Carl Sagan’s famous Golden Record mounted on the Voyager space probe to a field of grass stalks mounted on mechanical gimbals that use mission data from JPL rovers to visualize the wind on Mars. Each project features a brief description, conceptual images and installation shots, along with insights from the people behind it—referred to in JPL terms as “lead investigators.” Seriously cool stuff!
It was my job to work with JPL creative director David Delgado and his team to find a unifying structure that would make the book a true representation of the project that was both fun and useful for the audience. We settled on a 5 x 7 inch format reminiscent of field guides that fit into your pocket easily.
The fundamental design approach went through a number of major evolutions over the course of a year as the projects themselves were taking shape. In the end, we settled on a clean, concise layout that doesn’t call undue attention to itself and lets the work shine. In that sense, it’s directly in line with my work for art gallery L.A. Louver.
My thanks go to JPL visual strategist Carolina Uscategui who joined the project in the later stages of the process and took a firm hand in guiding the final result. (She also designed the beautiful foil-stamped book jacket in keeping with the graphics of the exhibit as created by her and Thomas Gottelier.)
As is always the case with multi-contributor projects, one of the challenges is to wrangle hundreds of images from vastly different sources. Images of vastly different style and quality have to be handled in such a way that the final product feel cohesive. But I always love that part of the work. It’s a great puzzle, and I love going through my bag of tricks to bring everything together. And of course, I got to access the wealth of incredible space imagery from NASA’s image library. (Which you can, too. All the images are in the public domain!)
Much credit and gratitude must go to JPL’s Chrissy Stevens who was my main point of contact on this job, and who functioned as the managing editor of this book. She kept a massive number of plates spinning, and and saw the whole thing through from conception to printing. Here is the spread in the book that shows the whole team:
Speaking of printing, this is a good opportunity for me to tell you about one of my pet peeves—and how to avoid it: If you’re printing a perfect bound book—a stack of paper glued along one edge and put into a paperback cover—the nature of that binding will create a deep fold at the center of your book. That’s called the gutter. (Or the gully, if you’re British.) Images vanish in the gutter, and the smaller to book, the bigger the loss. (This is a very small book.)
Designers who primarily work on and for the screen frequently design book spreads that look wonderful on their monitors, where pages are perfectly flat. Once the file goes to print, bad things happen. I demonstrated the problem thusly for my Book Design 101 class on Skillshare. My apologies for the traumatizing example:
To avoid this, you have to split the image down the middle and pull it apart, so that you compensate for the area that’s lost to the fold. This is particularly important with images that go across the whole spread. While you’re still looking at the design on your screen, it’s unsettling. Check out this image of the Golden Record for example. If you want it to look like this in the book:
You have to build your file like this:
Unnerving, right? And there are no hard and fast rules to calculate the amount of loss, either. It depends on the size of the book, it depends on where in your book the spread appears, and on the particular machine operator that day. All you really have to go on is experience and just how much “What if I went too far?” discomfort you can tolerate.
You can see the same issue on the following spread, but this also shows something else I do when I work with supplied imagery. Oftentimes, photographers will use a wide angle lens to document a scene, which distorts the image. Check out the vertical lines of the Alex Theatre in this photo of the opening night event. See how the building flares out at the base?
If you look at the image on a screen, you might not even notice. But in the context of a book, having perfectly vertical lines look tapered like that? It’s just not right. So I go in, I make a few little courtesy adjustments, I compensate for the gutter, and then we’re looking at this—verticals that are nicely parallel with the edges of the image and the page. (Did I consider straightening those palm trees? Of course. But there are limits, and there is therapeutic help that allows me to find them.)
In the end, the printed and bound spread looks like this:
Here are a few more (less anxiety-inducing) sample spreads for your nerdly pleasure:
