National Gallery of Victoria: Can you summarise the project and its objectives?
Thomas Deverall: The brief called for a generously illustrated catalogue to accompany the 2024 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces® exhibition Pharaoh, presented in partnership with the British Museum, London. Our publishing team were keen to emphasise the quality of the works in the exhibition as artworks and gently shift the look and feel of the publication away from a more standard museological presentation of artifacts.
NGV: How would you describe the desired mood of the publication and how did you work to achieve it?
TD: Pharaohs were Egypt’s kings, conduits between the divine and human realms. The publication design needed to convey a sense of ceremony and reverence, without overwhelming or eclipsing the content. We started with etching the objects from their backgrounds so we could place the works on a solid rich black background, adding drama and contrast and creating a consistent look and feel throughout.
The palette was extended with the addition of a warm gold metallic ink (Pantone 8384C) which reflected the opulence of the artworks. This also married with the palette of the exhibition design that moved through the phases of the day: gold for day and black for night. The gold was deployed sparingly in the essays – running headers only – and then ramped up for the section breaks which were printed all over solid gold, providing an arresting and lustrous moment between the chapters.
Published as a softcover and bound in beautiful 290 gsm Sirio Black paper, the package was wrapped by a generous 8-page jacket affixed to the spine and finished with the title rendered in a gold metallic foil.
NGV: What kind of typefaces did you use and why?
TD: As the essays progressed through editorial to design it was clear that there was voluminous detailed copy to accommodate so I needed a type design that was highly economical and inviting to read. I opted for a fully justified serif typeface – MVB Verdigris Pro – for the body copy and notes, with a display weight of the same face set in spaced all caps for the stately and elegant chapter headings. Designed by Mark van Bronkhorst, MVB Verdigris is a durable and compact reworking of classic Garalde-style typefaces such as Garamond – perfect for lengthy blocks of copy and headings alike. Subheadings and captions were set in a Söhne Breit, an extended Grotesque font from Klim Type Foundry, introducing a slightly unexpected and contemporary typographic element and providing a clear contrast with the copy.
NGV: What kind of challenges presented themselves in the design and how did you tackle them?
TD: This publication was very academic and detailed. The composition of text and images was largely determined by the requirement that the images were married as closely as possible with their text references and ordered accordingly in layout. Where possible, larger and key works were afforded more page real estate, and conversely, smaller, less critical and comparative works were run in the margins or in some cases indented within the text.