Gilles Gavillet, David Rust

Awarded

Gavillet & Rust: Gilles Gavillet / David Rust

Art direction and graphic design for the JRP¦Ringier books 2004 – 2007

Graphic Design

Giving a publishing house a face
The two graphic artists Gilles Gav­il­let and David Rust have been work­ing with pub­lisher Li­onel Bovier from JRP|Ringier for three years now. They de­signed a look for the newly founded pub­lish­ing house, and de­fined an ap­pear­ance for the var­i­ous se­ries of books. A major part of their work con­sisted of fix­ing the book ty­polo­gies with the pub­lisher, Gilles Gav­il­let ex­plains. They won­dered how best to de­sign books so that they were mu­tu­ally sup­port­ive and no­ticed in the trade. The pub­lisher de­cided to build the col­lec­tion up in two parts. The first part con­sists of the 'Artists' Books' and the sec­ond of fixed se­ries of books. For ex­am­ple, the sec­ond part in­cludes the 'Ref­er­ence Mono­graphs' and the 'First Mono­graphs'. The lat­ter are de­voted to young, up-and com­ing fig­ures in the art world. Each book has 64 pages, the same for­mat and paper, the same struc­ture and type­face – de­signed by Gilles Gav­il­let and David Rust. This clear frame­work was cho­sen so that the de­sign could re­spond to dif­fer­ent artists and could be rec­og­nized as a se­ries by the buy­ers. Yet the graphic artists can refer di­rectly to the artists' work, on the cover, for ex­am­ple. In the pub­li­ca­tion on the New York artists' duo Guy­ton/Walker they adopt the artists' in­ter­est in re­pro­duc­ing pic­tures: one of the artists' mo­tifs is re­pro­duced on the cover of the book, sev­eral times and in var­i­ous sizes. They make fur­ther use of the pos­si­bil­i­ties of this ap­proach in­side the book. The graphic artists are de­sign­ing in Guy­ton/Walker's for­mal lan­guage by du­pli­cat­ing and turn­ing the im­ages, and vary­ing their size.
The ap­proach is en­tirely dif­fer­ent for the 'Artists' Books'. Here the book is con­ceived in close co-op­er­a­tion with the artist. For ex­am­ple, 'About Noth­ing' is a col­lec­tion of 600 sketches that the artist John Arm­leder drew and painted over three decades. The pic­tures are re­pro­duced chrono­log­i­cally on white, coated paper – sim­ply and ret­i­cently. From the out­side the thick book is rem­i­nis­cent of an en­cy­clopae­dia. In one colour, with blocked title and spine and four in­te­gral book­marks, 'About Noth­ing' is cit­ing old, leather-bound books. Gilles Gav­il­let and David Rust show by their choice of books that they are mas­ters of three things that a pub­lisher needs: build­ing up a range of books vi­su­ally, de­sign­ing unique ob­jects and doing jus­tice to an artist within a fixed set of rules.
Ar­i­ana Pradal

Gilles Gavillet
Born in
1973
Education
designer HES en communication visuelle, spécialisation design graphique
Group name
Gavillet & Rust

David Rust
Born in
1973
Education
designer HES en communication visuelle, spécialisation design graphique
Group name
Gavillet & Rust