V&A books
Inside the world’s largest museum of art and design
How do you create a book that showcases the entire V&A South Kensington, representing the scale, breadth and soul of the Museum? Quite some feat if you have ever had the pleasure of visiting this cavernous museum; the building literally being a work of art in itself. To meet the challenge, we developed the concept of celebrating The Building, The Collection and The Unseen (their archive) through three core sections of the book.
Creating a book that’s ‘pocket-sized’ made it the perfect impulsive buy, encouraging people to pick it up and take it home rather than think about ordering later.
The book has quickly become the best-selling book at the V&A, selling over 60,000 copies and expanding to 4 other languages.
Scope
Art direction
Publication design
Part 01 - The Building
A photographic insight into the beauty of the museum itself. We used unique photography of interesting and unusual architectural elements which are often overlooked.
Part 02 - The Collection
Our core idea was to strip out scale and hierarchy from the objects. By pairing seemingly unrelated items through word play, shape association or similarity of context, we created a playful way to view content, read the book and discover objects in the V&A that you might not usually see.
Part 03 - The Unseen
With over 75% of the collection carefully archived in various V&A buildings away from public view, this section of the book is a photographic journey through the hidden gems currently in the archive.
The coolest museum guide in the world
Expanding the languages
Following the success of the English edition, we worked with the V&A to create 4 additional language versions, in French, Spanish, Italian and German. Each with a unique stand-out colour.
Tile patterns
Whilst enjoying the collections at the V&A, we spotted an abundance of tile patterns in different parts of the museum. Using this discovery, we created a graphic version for the English edition cover and endpapers. The natural progression for the extended languages was to create unique patterns for each edition.
Roll into retail
After The Souvenir was launched, the main gift shop in the V&A went through a complete redesign. The retail shelf space was designed to integrate the book, front and centre.
V&A retail team, inspired by The Souvenir book, decided to produce a range of complementary gifts based on the colours and patterns of the book covers.
Planning Unit worked on the V&A Souvenir book, which became the embodiment of what the V&A is hoping to be about. The book they made is already one of the museum’s bestsellers, and they led us to a finished product that I wasn’t expecting when we started. I’m very grateful, and looking forward to another project!
More work for the V&A
The V&A South Kensington guidebook
An inviting, well-priced and portable guidebook to demystify the museum for time-poor visitors and to be used by the Visitor Experience teams and volunteers front of house and in the galleries to support the Welcome Programme.
Designed to be modern yet classic, the guidebook had to be accessible to all those that entered the museum.
To do this, we worked with the publishing team to make sure the book was easy to navigate, introducing full page maps and a ‘top 20’ section that allows visitors to quickly locate the V&A’s most popular objects throughout the museum.
The Cast Courts
Opened in 1873, the Cast Courts display copies of some of the world’s most significant works of art reproduced in plaster, electrotype, photography, and digital media. Due to war and natural events, some of these are the only standing memorials of specific pieces and are now considered to be works of art in themselves.
Following its renovation in 2018, we were brought on board to create the book for this permanent collection.
The Raphael Cartoons
A set of seven full-scale designs for tapestry painted by Raphael (1483 – 1520), and are considered one of the greatest treasures of the Renaissance.
In 2020, the V&A marked the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death with the refurbishment of The Raphael Court, home to the iconic Raphael Cartoons, which are lent to the V&A from the Royal Collection by His Majesty The King since 1865. We were once again invited to design the book for this impressive collection at the V&A.
We really appreciated their flexibility, patience and good humour as well as their ability to meet all deadlines.
Special thanks to the teams from the V&A
Coralie, Tom, Susannah, Karen and Kirstin.
As well as all the other lovely team members we have worked with over the years.
