A heap of metal teapots cut into halves doesn’t sound like a beautiful image. But that’s how Art can change your mind – how it transforms you.

A Very New Edition

‘. . . one of the deepest revisions it has ever seen, including 25% new works.’

Translated from Quark to InDesign with the addition of new text elements, inset icons and Part Opening pages. These new features, and the potential for translation bugs, encouraged me to ditch the snowdrift of style sheets that had piled up over the previous ten editions. Even with more items to differentiate this clear-out made it possible to reduce the type range while still making clear distinctions between categories.

Accessing the 500 pictures archived from previous editions was not straightforward. For lots of boring reasons re-naming pictures is usually not a good idea. And you can rely on most art books to follow a predictable timeline – stone age rock art is going to be a low number near the beginning.

But Artforms compares art from different ages and locations. It thus leaps all over time and place – 13th century Syrian appearing next to 21st century European. This small difficulty was compounded by the radical restructure. The hunt was on for pictures archived under, by now, unrelated chapters numbers. Still it only started to appear that they had had it easy at Bletchley Park when the file names emerged as web-friendly: AAEFZYS0.TIF, for example. But thanks to Adobe Bridge and good-old eye contact the code was soon cracked.

Alternative cover designs submitted

Example Spreads