Hella Jongerius
monograph
concept and book design
This first monograph on Dutch product Designer Hella Jongerius presents a visual “catalogue” of her career in a cinematic graphic layout, consisting of photographs and interview text running continuously from the front cover through the book pages to the back cover.
The design of the book represents her way of working and thinking. Designed like an “image landscape”, the objects can be found surrounded by people at the factory, the storage, the store, the studio, the museum or the collector’s home. The photography aims to show the social and historic dimensions of the objects and Jongerius’s approach. There is a grid for the images and one for the text, independent of each other they allow for the element of chance—the interview text “grows vertically,” sometimes across the images, depending on the length of the question or answer. Sometimes conflicting, it reflects the friction of two meeting elements—a recurrent theme in the work of Hella. There is no table of contents, no beginning or end; the pages and the story of text and image just go on from the first page to the last page, to the back cover to the front cover, as an ongoing journey.