Printmaking Research Student Wins International Book Design Accolade
12 March 2013 – RCA Printmaking MPhil student Hans-Jörg Pochmann has taken the top accolade in the prestigious international book design competition, the Best Book Design from all over the World, for his first-ever book.
Pochmann pipped 13 other graphic designers, typographers and book designers from eight countries to the prize organised by German foundation, Stiftung Buchkunst. These were entered automatically after winning national book competitions in their home countries. Pochmann will receive ‘die Goldene Letter’ (an actual golden letter), awarded by Leipzig’s Deputy Mayor for Culture, Michael Faber, at the city’s book fair this Friday, 14 March.
Fallen, Pochmann’s first-ever book is self-published, and was his final project on Graphic Design at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. Plain, basic and typographically neat, it features two front pages but no back. There are two stories – one in German, and one in English – both read through to the end.
Readers start on a right-hand page, and leaf forward, rotating the book each time they turn a page until they end up on a left-hand page. The process starts again in the opposite direction. The resulting disorientation underlines the variance in meaning from German to English of the word ‘fallen’. The perfect tense in English denotes motion that has happened, while the German present tense suggests it is still happening.
Pochmann also paid the two authors for their text – an inversion of the conventional payment chain where the graphic designer is paid – underlining another ‘layer of turning’.
‘I really liked the ambiguity of the word in the two languages. Starting from this concept, I thought about what gravitation is for books: where is up, where is the beginning and the end?’ said Pochmann, who is now exploring the idea further through fine art and printmaking. ‘There is not normally much space for this in graphic design. It feels so surreal to have won as it’s my first book. It doesn’t even have an ISBN and there were only 50 copies altogether.’
The annual Best Book Design competition, celebrating its fiftieth year this year, assessed 575 books from 32 countries – each previously honoured by specialist panels in their countries of origin.
This year’s international panel comprised: Dr. Aladdin Jokhosha (Graphic Designer, Germany/Iraq), Gabriele Lenz (Graphic Designer, lenz+büro für visuelle gestaltung, Austria) , Tomas Mrazauskas (freelance Graphic Designer, Germany/Lithuania), Professor Felix Scheinberger (University of Applied Sciences, Munster, Germany), Roland Stieger (TGG Hafen Senn Stieger Atelier St. Gallen, Schwitzerland), Professor Wim Westerveld (Weißensee School of Art Berlin, Germany) , Susanne Zippel (Typographer/Graphic Designer, Mittelpunkt•Zhongdian, China/German).
See a video of Fallen here. Full details of the winners can be found here.