The way a page is used is essential for how the content is digested. In this week’s readings, the discussion of the page and its graphic design revealed how every aspect of a book can influence the consumption of the book itself. In Phillip Megg’s History of Graphic Design, he explains Modernist art movements from Cubism to Bauhaus and how each movement had a hand in the experimentation of typography and graphic design. 

After reading the excerpts from How the Page Matters, History of Graphic Design, and considering the books we looked on Tuesday’s lab, I couldn’t help but wish for more interesting designs in books. When interacting with the average book today, it is a somewhat simple task of opening the cover and flipping through the pages with a standard font. Although there are many ways to approach the construction of a book, not many are formatted in an interesting way that really draws in a reader; usually, the content does the heavy lifting. There is no problem with that at all, but after interacting with artists’ books, I just wanted more, even if it was just the typography. 

This also made me consider how children’s books are arguably one of the easiest ways for artists to play with form for a book and their own art. An example of this in the History of Graphic Design was in Chapter 15, which discusses the “father of the twentieth-century Russian picture book” (pg 8), Vladimir Vasilevich Lebedev. Lebedev used principles of constructivism and Bolshevism to create children’s books that indulged in lots of white space, primary colors, and basic geometric shapes, which doesn’t sound like the typical children’s book that uses the full page to contain illustrations. Instead, Lebedev created something fresh and refreshing to look at while satisfying his own artistic itch. Similarly, when rifling through the pop-up books in special collections, I imagined how much fun and satisfying creating a piece of art like could be for an artist. Books are simply another medium to play with and should be utilized more in that way, rather than just an information receptacle.