From museums to headphones to cinema screens, art is consumed and celebrated daily, but it’s rare for the process behind the artwork to be highlighted. In The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing (Penguin Press), former New York magazine editor Adam Moss examines the incredibly personal, rigorous and complex process of making art in a series of conversations with some of the most accomplished artists of our time. Pentagram created a design for the book that immerses readers in these discussions, weaving together journal entries, napkin doodles, sketches, outtakes and other background material to break down all the work that goes into making great art.
The Work of Art profiles almost 50 people from a wide variety of disciplines, including the artist Kara Walker, filmmaker Sofia Coppola, playwright Tony Kushner, composer Stephen Sondheim, illustrator Roz Chast, cook/writer Samin Nosrat, artist Barbara Kruger, poet Louise Glück, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, choreographer Twyla Tharp, architect Elizabeth Diller, fashion designer Marc Jacobs, photographer Susan Meiselas, crossword puzzle maker Will Shortz, and many others.
The Pentagram team collaborated closely with Moss on the design. To put all of the artists on equal footing, the interviews are arranged in no particular order; there is no hierarchy or grouping by discipline. Each chapter is treated like an academic journal, where the reproductions of chaotic scribbles, marked-up contact sheets and half-finished thoughts are arranged like treasured museum artifacts. The effect is like being dropped into a stream of artistic consciousness. No matter what page you open to, there are multiple points of entry into the content: sidebars, images, infographics, side-by-side visual comparisons, spot illustrations, fragments of letters, emails and text messages, and other details and asides.
Each of the chapters also went through multiple iterations, with extensive image research and photo editing by the Pentagram team. The challenge for the designers was keeping a tight connection between text and image; when a sketch or notebook or anything visual was described in the interview, Moss wanted the image to immediately follow. This was not always possible, so arrows break from the text to refer to specific examples. Footnotes also appear throughout. (The approach is cited by Walker Mimms in The New York Times Book Review: “Excellent layouts by the design firm Pentagram turn dense arrays of project ephemera into legible timelines.”)
The cover of The Work of Art is adorned with Marcel Proust’s markings on a manuscript of In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past, setting up the visual tone for the raw, unpolished interior. The display typography and body copy are set in Martina Plantijn (from Klim Type Foundry). Footnotes and sidebars are set in Pitch (also from Klim).
Ari Shapiro, co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” described The Work of Art as “a visual feast, full of drafts, sketches, and scribbled notebook pages. Every page shows how an idea becomes a finished design.” The New York Times journalist Ezra Klein commented, “This book is—and I really want people to hear it: It’s a piece of art.”
