Graphic Design: Brighten The Corners create stunning Anish Kapoor catalogue

Brighten The Corners have excellent pedigree when it comes to working with Anish Kapoor. Who can forget the dazzlingly good and deservedly-much-lauded annual report they collaborated on for a lighting company back in 2012? So when Anish needed a catalogue for his first major show in Germany, it’s no great surprise he turned to Frank Philippin and Billy Kiosoglou and the duo worked their magic once again.

The central work of the exhibition was called Symphony for a Beloved Sun which saw large drops of red wax dropped onto the gallery floor from conveyor belts. Taking this as inspiration, the cover of the catalogue is stained with red oil paint which seeps into the first pages. The paper was edged with a red cut and the whole thing was bound with red thread, continuing the colour scheme subtly throughout.

“We wanted our book to be both elegant and unsettling,” Brighten The Corners say. “Maintaining the strict classical grid for all text and images, meant that landscape images stretched across two pages, occupying the space they needed and reminding the reader of the works’ scale. Finding the right landscape images was a job in itself; hours spent with Anish Kapoor studio in the photo archive. Typographic chapter dividers grouped the works into categories and played further with scale by visually exploiting the font (Stempel Garmamond) and letting it have its moment in the book.”

It’s fitting the project scooped the Grand Prize at the Tokyo Type Directors’ Club awards; proof the Kapoor-Corners combination is a winning one in every sense.