Pentagram Austin has designed a third edition of photographer Randal Ford’s animal portrait series published by Rizzoli New York. Available now, Farm Life features Ford’s portraits of critters found on the farm including chickens, pigs, horses, sheep, goats, ducks, barn cats, cattle dogs, rabbits, llamas, yaks, barn owls and, of course, cows.
The shaggy Highland Cow featured on the cover of Farm Life brings the series around full circle to the legendary cows he photographed for Pentagram Austin’s redesign of Dairy Today magazine in 2008. That series of magazine cover images, photographed in a barn near Waco, Texas, went viral and launched Ford’s animal portraiture career. Those beloved dairy cow portraits shot against vibrant, pastel-toned seamless backdrops have adorned the walls of Pentagram’s Austin offices ever since.
Today, Randal Ford is recognized around the world for his masterful photography and studio-lit animal portraits. His award-winning works have been featured in a wide range of publications, including People, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Time, Texas Monthly and Wired. Few artists have photographed more animals in the studio.
Ford’s first animal portraiture book for Rizzoli New York, The Animal Kingdom, was published and designed by Pentagram Austin in 2018. That best-selling book, with a foreword by the renowned Austin-based photographer Dan Winters, was named Amazon’s Best Photography Book that year.
The Animal Kingdom was such a success Rizzoli asked Ford to do a follow up book featuring portraits of dogs. The resulting book, Good Dog, published in 2020 and named and designed by Pentagram Austin, became a best seller, even though it came out during the pandemic, and won several design awards.
Farm Life, with a foreword by Brian Patrick Flynn, an American interior designer best known for his work with Joanna Gaines as the host of Mind for Design, has a similar clean, modern aesthetic like its two sister publications but features a slightly more rustic vibe expressed through the slab-serif typeface Clarendon Wide in all-caps and a “down-on-the-farm” script called Dreamboat.
Like the two previous volumes, the careful juxtaposition and pairings of single page and full-spread portraits complement one another, and the farm animals featured in the book are identified by their names. Additional notes and observations by Ford are included in the back of the book in a playful format that harkens to a high-school yearbook. To top off the book's agrarian attitude, the hardcase of the book, clad in a “Barn Red” cloth, is blind embossed with a weathervane “F” icon based on one at the Ford family farm.
