Sunset Market Plaza
Book Design
Book Design
How can a book design capture the spirit of strip-malls in Los Angeles?
Sunset Market Plaza is a self-published book about strip-malls in Los Angeles. The book had a wide variety of material, including an interview, illustrations, a select directory of strip-mall businesses, short essays, artworks, and more. We also wanted the production of these books to feel as unique as possible, while on a limited budget for a small edition. Most importantly, the book’s design needed to capture the idiosyncratic spirit of the strip-mall aesthetic.
We developed a style guide that encapsulated the quirkiness of strip-malls in the book’s layout and typography. Combining different fonts, we created pleasingly awkward textures and shapes on the page. We wanted to keep that sense of variation going, with differing paper stocks and ink types. To achieve this we worked with two different, locally-based, printers—renowned Pasadena printer Typecraft for digitally printed parts and binding, and newer Chinatown-based outfit Press Friends for risograph inserts. For a dynamic effect on the cover, we hand-applied varying stickers.
We sold a limited quantity of the books at the LA Art Book fair, as well as on a microsite we designed promoting the book: www.sunsetmarketplaza.com. The books on the microsite are sold out, but you can find them at a couple other places: the gift shops at the Hammer Museum and the Whitney carry a few copies, as well as Actual Source’s webshop.
Untitled #11 from "Mini-mall" series by Catherine Opie
