A year ago all I wanted was a pair of Tony Lama full quill ostrich skin cowboy boots. So I went to Texas to get them. My wingman and I were realising that mythical American dream. We were on the road. As connoisseurs of American steel we rode a gunmetal-grey 2010 Ford Mustang on a 2500-mile loop out of Atlanta and back. Before setting off, we stuck our fingers to the wind to see how it blew. We wanted to collect T-shirts, drink beer and buy boots. Meet some designers too. Five star hotels were preferred and in the teeth of the Great Recession better value than a Motel 6. How long we would stay in any one place depended on whether it had a pool or not.

Rolling south through bourbon country the sun bore out like a hot rifle barrel, but the air-con blew cold. We had Playboy Radio to keep us company. After sampling Nashville, Memphis and the bizarre delights of Graceland Too in Holly Springs, Mississippi (that’s another story) we peeled off the I-10 onto a 200-mile stretch due west of the Mississippi river. Towards Texas.

Now I like Texas. It really is how they say it is. The T-bone state is big, very BIG. Everything is done to scale. You get the impression they’re just trying to fill it up. What do you do with all this space and that big wide sky? Concrete flyovers and flybys swept out of Houston. Big-hat-small-cattle country. Texas was the only place the heat made sense. Everywhere else from the Mississippi Delta to the Louisiana bayou was only a depression of oily air. In Austin, it’s authentic — dry and clear — a bit like DJ Stout.

We were keen to meet him. But would he see us? By way of introduction our editor had emailed Stout a copy of a story I’d told about Pentagram partner Harry Pearce — that should do it. Stout replied from Nowhere in far west Texas that he’d love to catch up, but wouldn’t be back for three days. We guessed that was pretty far west and as our hotel had a pool, we were staying.

Austin is a bubble town. Built over the years by artists, drifters, Mexicans and musicians; it was somewhere untouched by the dirty fingernails of a deep recession. Pitched between the glitzy cities of Houston and Dallas, Austin was rundown and flat out during the 1970s. Then the usual happened, it became cool and the douchebag moved in. But as you cruise the wide and lazy South Congress Boulevard, that original outlaw spirit is still alive and well.

It was Monday. The weekend had been heavy. Sunday was hazy. We found Pentagram’s Austin office in a nondescript building tucked away down a leafy street. Only a small red square with typeset Modern No.20 gave it away. We both wore boots and thought Stout would be impressed with our grasp of Texas culture. I don’t think he noticed.

Did he know what to expect? Who were these cowboys from New Zealand? We thought he looked stunned. Maybe a bit slow. Was it the heat? Could he understand us? No. We realised DJ Stout is a slow burner. I was prepared. Sam had his camera. I even had questions, but they went out the window. Stout just wanted to chew the fat.

DJ Stout joined Pentagram and Lowell Williams as partner in the Austin office 10 years ago. Since then Williams has moved along, but Stout burns on strong. With five dedicated staff he has quietly turned out a portfolio of recognised world-class work across identity and editorial design. Stout cut his teeth in Dallas working for corporate communications firm Robert A. Wilson Associates before moving to Austin in 1987 and sharpening them on Texas Monthly. His strong art direction and photographic sensibility set the magazine apart. There, Stout had a trusting editor and free rein as long as it was on time and budget. Many Texan photographers have that editor to thank, as Stout gave many a break to those just starting out. The irony now is Stout’s frequent requests to design books for those photographers he once commissioned at Texas Monthly.

So, it’s no surprise then that Stout’s first love is editorial design. “Commercial design is ‘fine to sell stuff’ but books and magazines have a higher calling” he says. “They are a search for something authentic and truthful”. Stout says a magazine is only as good as its content, which should resonate with its audience and whose design should be seamless: “you’re not supposed to notice it”.

The studio now works more and more across the identity and brand space as mainstream media tries to compete with the internet. Stout says the future of magazines is uncertain, The New York Times Magazine had to shave an inch off each side to save money.

He says the problem with the current crop of magazines is that they’re “eye candy only, they’ve lost the gritty content of their forebears, they’ve lost the ability to tell an authentic story”.

Being a partner at Pentagram comes with responsibilities. Not least, contributing to the ongoing series of Pentagram Papers. Stout talks about the 39th edition, Signs. In true Texan style he wanted to “do it his way”.

He says previous papers had been “things that interested Pentagram, architectural toys and kimonos and so on, but this time I wanted to do something relevant, highlight a social issue and draw attention to something important.”

Inspiration for this issue came through Stout’s sons, who gave their time to the local homeless shelter, ‘Mobile Loaves and Fishes’, making sandwiches for those without a home. If there is one thing you notice travelling the southern states, it’s the homeless and their signs. Pleas for money, food and booze. The raw material for Signs is the scribbles and scraps of cardboard collected by local Austinite Joe Ely, who was a drifter himself in the 1970s. Ely recalls his first purchase: “The guy looked at me with surprise. He wondered if I was on drugs”. Stout then worked with photographers Michael O’Brien and Randal Ford, making moving portraits and records of the signs, or, as Ely says in his foreword, “signs of the times”.

But rather than just giving the books away, Stout asked for something in return. All in, Signs raised $5,000 for Mobile Loaves and Fishes. Stout had set a benchmark for future Pentagram Papers. No more kimonos and designer follies then?

By now we had taken an hour and were thinking of wrapping up, but Stout was warming to his theme, wanting to show us his latest project and the reason he’d just returned from far west Texas. The state is full of eccentric characters and none was stranger than wealthy oilman and rancher Herbert Kokernot. In the 1950s, he built the Alpine Cowboys into the biggest little baseball team in the desert. From the pictures and photo albums Stout pulled from the boxes he’d collected off Kokernot’s grandson at the end of a dusty crossroads, we began to understand just how strange old man Kokernot really was. Stout is connected through his father Doyle who was a professional pitcher drafted on a full college scholarship. It’s an oddball Texas story and an even bigger book. But as a 6th generation Texan there’s no one better to tell it than Stout.

It was still warm and time for a beer. We asked Stout where his local was. He pointed across the street from the studio to the ‘Cat’. ‘The Mean Eyed Cat’ is a rundown shack slash Johnny Cash tribute bar squeezed between two high-rise apartment buildings. A former chainsaw repair store, I kid you not. As we sat in the ‘Cat pulling on Lone Star beers we thought about this gritty little fort. Holding out amongst those glass towers. Much like DJ Stout. Still here. Still wanting to tell real stories. Still embracing Texas and investing the spirit of the west in everything he does.

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Designer Cameron Gibb was applauded at last night’s ceremony for a design that judge Peter Gilderdale said is of ‘the highest quality, and the judges ultimately had no hesitation in choosing this as the best book … The Life & Love of Trees had an x-factor that was hard to deny’.

The judging team of Peter Gilderdale, Sharon Grace and Graham Beattie went on to praise Gibb’s work by saying, ‘The book has a huge impact, and what we liked was the way the design was able to enhance the photography in such a way that the whole became greater than the sum of the parts. There are lots of coffee table books with wonderful photos, but few of them achieve this impact – and we think the designer has to take much of the credit.’

The winner of another major award of the night, the Harper Collins Award for Best Cover, went to Magpie Hall, designed by Sarah Laing and described by the judges as ‘an outstanding example of a well designed and executed cover, back and front, that reflects the story in an appealing way.’

Another standout this year was Old Hu-Hu, designed by Michael Greenfield and illustrated by Rachel Driscoll, winner of the Scholastic New Zealand Award for Best Children’s Book. Earlier this year awarded the New Zealand Post children’s book of the year, the title was described by the judges as a ‘superb integration of text and illustration’.

Also announced last night was the winner of the Awa Press Young Designer of the Year which went to Keely O’Shannessy, along with awards for Best Cover, Typography, Illustrated, Non-Illustrated, Children’s and Educational Books.

The judging team said, ‘The quality of the design shown proves that the standard of New Zealand book design is very high and would compare with the world’s best.’

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Cover Design: Keely O’Shannessy for As the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong (Penguin Group (NZ)).

Finalists in the Publishers Association New Zealand Book Design Awards were recently announced. It's always interesting to see what our book designers have come up over the course of a year, so for your viewing pleasure here's a gallery of shortlisted books (covers only), and some additional information supplied by the awards convenors.

Finalists for the 201­0 PANZ Book Design Awards are as follows:

Scholastic New Zealand Award for Best Children’s Book

Anita Mcleod, Book Design Ltd and Katz Cowleyfor  The Wonky Donkey by Craig Smith (Scholastic New Zealand)

Michael Greenfield for Old Hu-Hu by Kyle Mewburn (Scholastic New Zealand)

Anna Seabrook for Ben and Mark: Boys of the High Country by Christine Fernyhough and John Bougen (Random House New Zealand)

Hachette New Zealand Award for Best Non-illustrated Book

Sarah Laing (cover), Kate Barraclough (interior) for Dead People’s Music by Sarah Laing (Random House New Zealand)

Spencer Levine (cover and interior) Dee Murch (layout) for In a Word: The Essential Tool for Finding the Perfect Word by Mark Broatch (New Holland Publishers (NZ))

Keely O’Shannessy (cover), Katrina Duncan(interior) for Mirabile Dictu by Michele Leggott  (Auckland University Press)

Random House New Zealand Award for Best Illustrated Book

Fiona Lascelles for Villa: From Heritage to Contemporary by Patrick Reynolds, Jeremy Hansen and Jeremy Salmond (Random House New Zealand)

Spencer Levine (cover) and Katrina Duncan (interior) for Marti Friedlander by Leonard Bell (Auckland University Press)

Cameron Gibb The Life & Love of Trees by Lewis Blackwell (PQ Blackwell)

Pearson Award for Best Educational Book

Anna Seabrook for Get Growing: A New Zealand Step-by-step Guide to Growing Your Own Vegetables and Fruit by Helen Cook (Random House New Zealand)

Cheryl Rowe, Macarn Design Geography on the Edge by Justin Peat and John Lockyear (Cengage Learning)

Book Design Ltd for Year 9 Graphics by Pail Bourdiot (Cengage Learning)

G.A. Pindar & Son Award for Best Typography

Mission Hall (interior), Afineline (additional design and typesetting) for Art at Te Papa by William McAloon (Te Papa Press)

Kate Barraclough for A Treasury of New Zealand Baking edited by Lauraine Jacobs (Random House New Zealand)

Kate Barraclough for Wine Class: All You Need to Know about Wine in New Zealand by Jo Burzynska (Random House New Zealand)

HarperCollins Publishers Award for Best Cover

Keely O’Shannessy for As the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong (Penguin Group (NZ))

Sarah Laing for Magpie Hall by Rachael King Random House New Zealand

Carolyn Lewis for A Beautiful Game by Tom Watt (PQ Blackwell)

Press info from BPANZ:

Designers “shape the way readers experience a book,” says Peter Gilderdale, one of the judges. “Authors provide the content, but the designer can either enhance or inhibit the way the book functions.”

The depth of talent made it difficult for Gilderdale, along with the other judges, Graham Beattie and Sharon Grace, to select 2010’s contenders Gilderdale adds, “The standard was very high and even — a wonderful mix of the vibrant and restrained, clever and crafted, quirky and traditional — this is great for book buyers but tough on judges!”

A new award for young designers introduced last year has proved spot on, with this year’s main category shortlist featuring all three 2009 Awa Press Young Designer of the Year finalists: Spencer Levine (winner), Keely O’Shannessy and (ProDesign designer – ed) Carolyn Lewis. Finalists for the 2010 Awa Press Young Designer of the Year Award will be announced on Thursday 3 June.

Levine is one of the designers who feature multiple times,  along with Kate Barraclough, and Sarah Laing, who has not only designed two of the books in the shortlist, but is also the author of one of them.

Ranging from the commercially successful New Zealand titles like The Wonky Donkey and A Treasury of New Zealand Baking to beautiful international titles The Life & Love of Trees and A Beautiful Game, this year’s shortlist illustrates the diversity of the New Zealand literary landscape.

The 2010 judging panel is Peter Gilderdale, Head of Graphic Design at AUT University, Graham Beattie, a fulltime book reviewer and book blogger, and designer Sharon Grace.

The awards are run by the Publishers Association of New Zealand (PANZ) to promote excellence in, and provide recognition for, the best book design in New Zealand. The competition is judged in six categories, with a winner for the highly coveted Best Book chosen from the shortlist and sponsored by Nielsen Book Services.

Winners will be announced at a ceremony in Auckland on 22 July, along with the Awa Press Young Designer of the Year. The awards are sponsored by a range of publishers, along with North & South magazine and Kalamazoo Wyatt & Wilson printers.

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Spread from Joseph Churchward.

David Bennewith, in his biographical endeavour Joseph Churchward, presents us with the rational and intuitive sides of the type designer and recipient of New Zealand’s highest honour for designers at the recent BeST Awards. The book reflects on an extensive body of work – spanning four decades and encompassing over 600 fonts – which Churchward tenderly describes as a gift that he had to produce. In following the backstory, Meena Kadri discovers that more gifts in the form of postal correspondence between biographer and subject shaped the sense of treasure the volume exudes.

(From ProDesign 104, with additional images)

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind its faithful servant.”
–Albert Einstein

Joseph Churchward cover.

While some books are meant merely to be read, Joseph Churchward is very much a book to be experienced. Its compilation of anecdotes, archival material, correspondence and commentary presents a loosely structured yet ever-insightful portrait of a prolific designer for whom typography is a constant in life. Nostalgic reminiscences of drawing letters in the sand along a Samoan beach, which were in turn devoured by an insatiable tide, are recalled, referred to and repeated. Bennewith mentions that he would receive packages from Churchward of up to forty sheets and that at times he was overwhelmed by such repetition. “But over time I began to see this as an essential element of translating the wealth of material that was arriving – items became re-contextualised in relation to the things they were packaged with and a richer story began to emerge.”
The exchange developed between the pair when Churchward was in Wellington and Bennewith was a researcher in design at the Dutch Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Bennewith pays subtle tribute to this geographical polarity by placing the book’s footnotes at the head rather than the foot of the pages. Initially Bennewith found his side of the handwritten exchange challenging, noting that you can’t easily delete what you’ve written, but he started to discover a different approach to text and an appreciation for the physicality of Churchward’s work. Hand lettering, from full character font sets to postal correspondence, came more naturally to Churchward – whose business card proudly proclaims that ‘Hand Lettering is Superior.’
Bennewith would dispatch to Churchward samples of the designer’s typefaces that he found in use, as well as his own typographical experiments; in return he would receive biographical and archival excerpts, often in no particular order, which he would be left to decipher. But Bennewith observed that editing is an intergral part of graphic design and took it in his stride to apply such skills to his search for a narrative grasp of Churchward’s life.
Joseph Churchward grew up in Samoa as the progeny of the colonial Pacific and with an ancestry that includes English, Scottish, Tongan, Chinese and Samoan. As a teenager he arrived in New Zealand by boat to further his education, which in time led him to the Wellington Technical College. Exhibiting a flair for hand-lettering he took up work at the Charles Haines advertising firm upon graduating, where he would manually craft headlines. As his expertise and experience grew he founded Churchward’s Lettering Service in 1962. A sales rep from the German Berthold company that supplied typesetting machines encouraged Churchward to submit a selection of his typefaces to their head office and they became the first internationally licensed font designs by a New Zealander.
More international attention followed when in 1971 he earned a stash of prizes at the American Lettergraphics International Alphabet Design Competition and by the mid-70s he was licensing from Italy to the US. The end of the decade saw Churchward complete 150 alphabets and secure membership with the Association Typographique International (ATypI). On home turf his work featured in the public domain on brands from Woolworths to the Wellington’s Evening Post and by the height of the 80s boom his office boasted a staff of eighteen. However the inevitable crash signaled the closing of Churchward’s venture and a return to Samoa. In the mid-90s family pulled him back to Wellington and he continues to produce typefaces from his home studio – now aged 76.

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

Bennewith does not gloss over the frustrations and challenges faced by Churchward, nor ignores his perseverance and compulsion. Despite his international success, local designers were at times less responsive to his font releases. In 1973 the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council turned him down for a travelling scholarship based on their view that lettering was not an art. Unabated by less favourable reception to his typographic endeavours, Churchward has pursued unsolicited design work throughout his career. He diligently dispatched these typographic ‘suggestions’ to television networks, political parties and government departments. The book’s inclusion of some of the rejection letters to this approach serve as a testimony of his dedication to a life of letters and letterforms – and amusingly includes a polite reply from the Rugby Union manager in 1998, set in Comic Sans.

Churchward’s family have been interwoven into his professional life, with five of his children working under him at various times in roles from typesetting to darkroom assisting. Bennewith devotes a chapter to exploring Churchward’s Marianna typeface which was named after his daughter. Churchward lovingly recalls “Marianna was fat in those days and it was a fat design … You were plumpy … it was plumpy.” Bennewith observes that the recently digitised Marianna “takes up just 120kb of hard disk space on a computer, so – if you have it – Marianna is always attendant. Whenever I make use of Marianna I am conscious of also sending something about you out into the world. Something akin to digital pollen, transmitted by wires, disks, signals, film, ink and paper …” Thus Bennewith raises the notion of the typeface as biographic and the paradox that this entails.

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

Biographic tendencies are alluded to elsewhere in the book. “He forged his own alphabets by reinterpreting the familiar forms of his daily work and endowing them with influences from his culture and surroundings.” Churchward himself points to his hybrid lineage as influencing his approach – reflecting on characteristics such as Chinese diligence, British authority and Samoan flamboyance. In certain fonts he has delved into his ethnic roots or, in the case of Churchward Maori, has examined the decorative devices of national cultures.
It is Churchward Maori that British artist and writer Paul Elliman insightfully describes as “the empire writing back”. He sees its reference to local land and culture conversing with the imperial power of typography as a collision of Polynesian and colonial entities.
Bennewith was intrigued by the reactions of Elliman and others to Churchward’s work and found that they became significant to the telling of his story. “People would respond in relation to their own expertise and I saw that this could open the scope of the narrative. By including different voices I was able to create more of an ongoing conversation than a static history.” Chapters such as those by Elliman expand our understanding of Churchward far beyond his typefaces alone. The fusion of influence and interpretation that is found throughout Churchward’s process reflect both an innate curiosity and drive to devise functional alphabets. This duality in Churchward’s work encompasses Einstein’s notion of both gift and servant: intuition and rationality – both in harmonious and enduring unison.
Bennewith's account of Churchward embodies discovery, conversation and exchange – coloured by a multitude of voices on its central character. Just as Churchward’s work is framed as process-led, the book design is punctuated by various paper stocks which exalt a diversely inspired, practice-based approach while honouring Bennewith’s appreciation of Churchward’s “quirks and exactitudes”.

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

Production shot.

Book production shot.

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