Faber Finds generative book covers

By Gavin on Creative Review 's blog

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Faber Finds is a recently launched service offered by publisher Faber and Faber that utilises digital print technology and affordability to make out-of-print books available once more. Basically, a book is only printed when someone orders it - and, thanks to some clever gener­ative programming by Universal Everything’s Karsten Schmidt (who was working for postspectacular.com at the time of commission), each cover printed promises to be totally unique. Various decorative elements designed by Marian Bantjes are arranged by the programme into a decorative border around the book’s title and author. The latter appear in a bespoke font, b-hmmnd, designed by Build’s Michael Place.

The process may sound relatively straightforward when distilled like this but Karsten Schmidt has talked to cr about the complexities of the programming – from getting to grips with the rules and nature of the design elements to creating a generative solution which would introduce variations at certain points of its design process, manage and even aesthetically judge them automatically. As promised in the current issue, here is Schmidt’s full technical breakdown of the processes involved:

A year ago Faber & Faber commissioned PostSpectacular to help with the design of a software system to generate complete & print ready book covers for their new imprint Faber Finds, an on-demand print service of out-of-print books. The challenge was more of a creative than a technical one, as the task given was to build a “design machine” which would be flexible enough to generate a very large (theoretically infinite) number of unique designs, one for each single book printed, within the agreed boundaries set by Faber’s art direction.

Faber also commissioned Canadian typographer Marian Bantjes to create four designs used as templates for the desired look & feel of the borders styles of each of the different genres offered by the imprint (Fiction, Non-fiction, Arts and Children’s). Each of her design routes then needed to be abstracted, decomposed into smaller elements & shapes, parametrized and generally reverse engineered conceptually.

Only once we understood all the rules and nature of the design elements used on all levels, we could start building a generative solution which would introduce variations at certain points of its design process, manage and judge them automatically. This initial part of the process included things like identifying the 5 levels of symmetry used in Marian’s sketches, experimenting with minimum and maximum border widths & densities, exploring individual symmetry limits per shape element, finding the right amounts of shape elements used per border quadrant, ensuring author names and titles (set in Michael C. Place’s beautiful B-HMMND font) are correctly word wrapped whilst not being obscured by the borders etc. In total we isolated over 35 of such rules and parameters…

Generative design systems often work on the premise of extrapolating a given design idea/art direction. Because our aim was to create such a system (rather than a single one-off design), it was important to find the extreme cases and boundaries of expressions possible and then shaping them. Finding appropriate values to these design parameters required a phase of constant experimentation and conversations with Faber’s design team - these collaboratively agreed boundary values then became the encoded art direction within the software.

Generating the borders was just one, if major, task of the final solution, though. Our custom software was developed in Processing (http://processing.org), Java and PHP and works as an internal webservice at Faber which receives new batch orders and then generates complete, print ready PDF files with all copy, branding, spine, ISBN, barcode and optional high-res JPG preview using the book details supplied. Generating a single cover only takes about 1 second, but due to its iterative and semi-random nature can sometime require hundreds of attempts until a “valid” design is created which is judged to be “on brand” by software itself.

The project was art directed by Darren Wall at Faber and Faber.

To see Karsten Schmidt’s own blogpost about this project, visit postspectacular.com/process/20080711_faberfindslaunch

faber.co.uk/faberfinds
bantjes.com
wearebuild.com

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