Moyna Flannigan: Space Shuffle
Published by Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2024
Edited by Jane Connarty and Sorcha Carey
Photography by John McKenzie
Designed by James Brook
Soft cover | 210 x 155 mm | 48 pages | Printed by Gomer, Wales, on Edixion Offset
Space Shuffle is the second publication that I have designed for the artist Moyna Flannigan, it was published by Collective Gallery to coincide with the artist’s exhibition, also called Space Shuffle, which ran from 28 June to 15 September 2024. Created in response to the unique context and architecture of Collective’s City Dome gallery, the exhibition featured figurative collages and embroidered cross-stitch works alongside an installation of paper sculptures. The book is a documentation of the exhibition and includes a text written especially for the publication by art historian Pia Gottschaller and an illuminating conversation between the artist and Collective’s director, Sorcha Carey.
The book was designed in close collaboration with the artist and Collective Gallery. As a starting point, I designed a logo that is set in Gridular, a typeface designed by Mark Bloom for CoType Foundry. The design of the typeface takes a cue from Wim Crouwel’s Architype Stedelijk typeface, and carries connotations of both the space age and of cross-stitched embroideries – both themes from the exhibition. The logo was typeset in uppercase only using the typeface’s alternate characters to give a monospaced appearance. For the title of the exhibition, I generated an outlined version of the typeface to create contrast between the artist’s name which was typeset as a solid version. The section openings were also typeset in Gridular, using the monospaced alternates but set in title case and with kerning to aid readability (Gridular was a bit clunky to read in the longer section titles, especially in upper case only). The rest of the book is typeset in Azo Sans, which is the typeface that I used in Matter – the first book that I designed for the artist – which sits very well with, and acts as a contrast to Gridular.
The layout was designed to be flexible and to accommodate images of different sizes and shapes, some full bleed and some with a border, some sitting on the underlying grid and some placed more intuitively. As the gallery wanted to include installation shots in the book, we worked on a very tight schedule, with the photographer John McKenzie booked in to photograph the gallery on the day that the exhibition opened to the public. Most of the material in the book had been put in place ahead of the exhibition opening with placeholders for the photographs of the installation. Once the installation shots were ready, I spent a constructive morning with Moyna and Sorcha at my computer to put the shots in place, moving images around to make the best dialogues between images and text.
Space Shuffle is printed on Edixion Offset, an economical white uncoated paper that takes ink well and that has a pleasing soft texture. As with Matter, the cover is not laminated, which caused some concern with the printer about cracking on the folds of the spine but, happily, this did not happen and the book looks good and feels great in the hand.
As always, it was a pleasure to work on the book with Moyna, an artist whose work I really admire, and with Sorcha Carey and Jane Connarty who I have previously worked with on several publications for the Edinburgh Art Festival.
