Rebecca Senf: Creating Artist’s Books

Tia Hay

January 18, 2015

Rebecca Senf: Creating Artist’s Books

In her article, Creating Artist’s Books, Rebecca Senf describes her experience as a juror in rating a collection of books, specifically what made a successful book effective. Senf considered every aspect of how the maker created the book and carefully constructed each decision. She found the most effective books to be ones that payed close attention to the typeface, image sequence, placement of text, and the scale and trim of the book. The most successful books were those that created an experience for the viewer by making the form match the creator’s intent. From this reading, I’ve written down tips suggested by Senf, including, “creating a powerful sense of concept.” Also, when making decisions for your image sequence, print little pictures out on inexpensive printer paper and play around with the image’s order to get creative in their placement on their future pages. Another tip I took from this reading was to consider the placement of the text because if the text is placed directly on the image then it is just as important as the image. This makes me question if there is any purpose to text, depending on the image’s content. Another suggestion I plan on keeping in mind is collaborating with other artists, photographers, and designers to gain insight on their ideas and opinions on what works and doesn’t. I’m inspired by the books shown in class so far that are unexpected, for example the ‘Holy Bible’ book, but I am even more inspired by the book of the day and night images of LA. I think the simplicity speaks as loud as the book’s content.