Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand
Award for Best Typography 2024
Finalist
Designers: Cover: Toby Curnow, Inhouse
Interior: Arch & Jane MacDonnell, Inhouse
Title: The Chair
Publisher: Objectspace
Format: 240 x 170mm, 272pp, exposed binding
Typography: The Future
The Future Mono (captions and footnotes)
“The premise of this exhibition and accompanying book is simple. One object type – the chair – explored from the earliest documented period of local production through to today. The book is to present all 107 chairs in chronological order along with an introductory essay and index of chairs.
Kris Sowerby’s The Future presented some delightful conceptual moments, featuring experimental alternates with flattened arches as the headline font. The lowercase ‘h’ served as a visual metaphor for a chair. The entire typeface family of The Future was used exclusively, with the mono variant reserved for captions and footnotes. The written chair entries were arranged on a flexible grid system that balanced variance and uniformity. These entries often subtly mirrored chair forms, with the first column sometimes taller than the second, and vice versa.”
Judges’ comments There is a deliberate flex in the design system that allows each page to typographically represent the form of the chair it’s highlighting, only further bolstered by its monospaced header font also resembling the chair forms at a more microscopic level. This sums up the joyful and playful type design throughout this book. This title revels in its command of the grid and even challenges with its in your face all caps references to deliver a cheeky yet wholly effective design system.
