Why commercial viability isn't the only marker of successful book design

Theseus Chan was the first Singaporean artist and designer to have a solo exhibition at the prestigious Ginza Graphic Gallery in Tokyo and was also the first Singaporean to be inducted into the Alliance Graphique Internationale, a club of the world's leading graphic artists and designers. In 2020, Chan was one of four overseas artists selected to produce artworks for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, and his work is in the permanent collection of Ginza Graphic Gallery in Tokyo, the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, and the Museum of Visual Culture in Hong Kong. Chan started visual magazine WERK in 2000, which garnered international acclaim for pushing the boundaries of publication design. Here, the D&AD Book Design Jury President for 2024 explains why he wants to see more experimentation in book design.

I hope to see more experimental work, and not just books that are created in traditional ways. If I saw something beyond beautiful typography and great subject matter, that would be really eye opening. Rebellious work is not in trend right now, and I feel like if we encourage designers to be more experimental, it might give them the confidence to embrace things they might not have been taught or might not be familiar with already. There are art books that have been made in a very experimental way, but it’s not in the mainstream. You won’t find rebellious work on newspaper stands for example. I have deep respect for traditional book design, but I’m wondering, is there something beyond that? Can the whole approach be upturned? I know there must be designers out there challenging the status-quo, and that’s what I’m looking out for.

If the objective is to sell books, there are already a lot of beautiful books out there that people will happily buy. My question to the industry is, how do we ensure the longevity of interest in printed books? Are there areas in which book design can be altered, in which the design can actually change and we can go beyond predictability? That requires a bit of courage and boldness, and it requires boldness not only from the designer themselves, but also from the commissioner of the project, and the client or publisher. I'm not sure whether there's a good balance currently, between having that experimental edge and being commercially viable.

The notion of being liked and accepted is something most people think is the measure of success. But I think one of the objectives of a designer is to constantly challenge themselves and not be satisfied with the current state of things. If being commercially viable is templated and people always reference what has worked before, that’s extremely boring. It's like, when you're trying to make a hit record, and the record company tells you that they want an album to be the same as the previous one, because that was your number one album. A bonafide artist with drive and vision would walk away from that, right? If you're working in a publishing house and your job is to sell books, that kind of thinking is sometimes required and you do the best you can. Think to yourself, if you were to design a book anonymously, what would you do with it? That’s the type of thinking I want to encourage. What vision would you then bring; thinking only of the discipline of design?

I’m not talking about anarchy or a destruction of traditional methods of book design when I say I want experimentation. Books are interesting to begin with, and they have to function the way books do — you have to be able to hold it, flip through it, smell it — and have that tactile experience. The unpredictability can be added in things like the way it’s bound, colour reproduction, or perhaps the cover treatment. These are the areas that have more of a canvas space, so to speak, for you to express yourself and your design, and there’s some room for accidents. Technology is so good right now, you could produce anything, and have it be almost 100% perfect. But perfection more often than not makes for something very predictable. What is interesting is to find some glitches somewhere. At least for me, that's why I look for the sort of thing that is totally unseen or overlooked. That is what will help the field of book design grow and evolve. That’s what makes books more exciting. 

D&AD Awards 2024 is now open for entries. The Book Design category includes printed and digital books across a range of genres, photographic books and revised editions. Learn more about and enter the Book Design category here.