16 Designers, 16 paper stocks, tonnes of great ideas

Consultancy Thomas Manss & Company has designed new book, 16/1, which saw 16 international book designers tasked with creating a sixteen-page section and a different paper to work with. They were briefed to ‘focus on the quality of the paper, to explore the essence of the book form and to express their creative identity infused by their diverse cultural backgrounds’, according to Thomas Manss & Company.

Art directed by Thomas Manss & Company partner Enrica Corzani, the resulting tome, 16/1, is the first of two volumes that have been created, and includes stories, challenges and games that celebrate great design and interesting paper-stocks, exploring their colour, brightness, opacity, light-refraction and other qualities.

The challenge for the designers was the reverse of the usual ‘what paper to use for this book’ dilemma. Instead, the paper came first, the content later.

Paper company Fedrigoni, which commissioned the project, says, ‘We wanted to question the assumption that some papers are old fashioned. Who uses laid paper nowadays? Bible publishers? Academic publishers for philosophy texts? We felt we needed to play with papers as if we had seen them for the first time.’

Thomas Manss & Company created the section about Spanish book designers Sánchez. Other designers who have created work for the book include Studio Joost Grootens, Rainer Groothius, Frédéric Teschner and Kameel Hawa.

16 Designers launched at last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair. You can view the entire book here, and by clicking on ‘contact us’ at the bottom of the page you can request a book for yourself.