It's the white space!

I remember well in the early 1980s, when I was working as an Exhibitions Planner at the Powerhouse Museum (Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences) in Sydney, and the curators had organised a temporary exhibition while the in-house graphic artist, Colin Rowan, was responsible for designing a catalogue of the collection. I was as keen and as curious as any 3D designer to know the arts of graphic design, particularly as the Face and ID magazines were stocked on the news agency shelves with the powerful work of Neville Brophy being their signature. I was an enthralled, but a clumsy imitator.

It needed the sharp and experienced eye of Colin to highlight to me the value of white space and the 'challenge' text could play with photography when laying out a graphic-based book or magazine. "Where there is nothing, there is a shitload of implied content" Colin said. continuing "how far apart or how crammed up the photograph was to another image or to accompanying text, helps give value and prominence to all the different parts of a well designed page".

Almost 40 years later, I am thankful for the early conceptual design of Photography in Laos that was done in August by the Cambodian-based graphic designer, Douglas Gordon. Douglas reiterated Colin’s fundamental principle – perhaps in more elegant words – but nevertheless he has created a riveting concept for a front cover. It allows the photograph's content to breathe and yet calls out the content and proposes a deal for a potential buyer/reader. The cover design makes it easy for a traveler to Laos to 'log onto' the content of the image, nudge the sleeping rickshaw driver awake, and let him take you into the background stories of photography in the country.