DVice One (1), a capabilities brochure/serial publication for Digital Color Concepts designed by WITH Creative, is the most recent recipient of PaperSpecs Gallery’s Take Note Award.
Earl Gee, partner and creative director at Gee + Chung Design in San Francisco and judge for Quarter Three awards, was immediately drawn to the over-sized publication with questions on how the piece was cut and assembled in such an unusual way.
“Everyone who sees this wonderful project for the first time instinctively wants to straighten what appears to be askew edges,” says Sabine Lenz, founder of PaperSpecs.
The Inspiration
“I happened to be walking around the studio one day, dropped a manila folder and then tried to shuffle it back together,” said WITH Creative Director Jonathan Gouthier. “I said, ‘Wow, what a brilliant concept of something falling apart and not being able to get it back together.’”
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC12Hz7g6aI]
Gouthier used the visual inspiration of disparate edges as a jumping off point to create a high-end publication that showcased Digital Color Concepts’ retouching and printing capabilities.
To get the look of papers no longer in perfect alignment, the 4-page forms of the 24-page brochure were diecut to produce angles reminiscent of a Stealth fighter jet. The spreads were then gathered together and secured with a clear rubber band.
The Highlights
While the brochure was laid out efficiently on only three sheets of paper, production on the piece was complex – a different diecut pattern for each form, alignment of photographs that crossed over spreads, achieving a squareness that would allow the spreads to be taken apart and used as posters, running press tests on the uncoated stock to see how the images would look.
Finishing was also challenging – hand collating and assembling the forms, using a large rubber band as the binding method. No detail was missed, and each was fully used as an opportunity to showcase intelligent design and excellent production skills – a debossed dialogue box on the front cover is topped with a business card-sized pocket that houses an introduction card. The pocket includes a thumb-notch to help you remove the intro card, but it was placed off center and in the shape of a “1” for the first edition.
The project definitely took guts to produce – from the concept to the subject matter, from the design to the copy, from the Peter Hapak images to the execution – and that’s the result of what WITH Creative terms “intelligent design” where strategic insight fuses with creative intuition, where the collaborative process goes deep, igniting a dialogue with customers about their businesses and the future of their brands.
NOTE: See more inspiring designs in our weekly Paper Inspiration video series.
