Book of Hours

Book of Hours is a book by photographer Ida Pimenoff with her photography and writing. I’ve known Ida for a long time, and was very happy she asked me to design the book with her. The form of the book was changing along the process but finally turned out to be quite close to an idea we spoke of early in the making of the book; a notebook with a feeling of everyday.

There are two different covers, both are shots of the same cloud taken moments apart, so the impression is similar but not identical. There are folds in both front and back covers there the cover image continues. The paper is Lessebo Design, which feels very nice and smooth in the fingers.

The book is bound with swiss binding, so the spreads open (almost) completely. The images can be seen completely and the fold doesn’t hide them.

Many of the images are shot in panoramic format so the book shape was built around them, with some flexibility for other formats. At times the editing of the book felt a lot like editing a film because of the cinema-like quality of many shots.

With smaller images and texts I paid a lot of attention to the interplay of the elements within the spreads and also from one spread to the next.

The only typeface used in the book is Minion Pro, a common font that is nevertheless very well done and quite friendly and familiar in appearance. The typeface is designed with different versions for different text sizes, many of which were in use in the texts.

Book of Hours, like Ida’s earlier books, was published by Kehrer Verlag. Here’s a flip-through video of the book.