Back in 2016, my partner Gayla Trail and I collaborated to self-publish her fifth book, Grow Curious. She was the author and I did the design and artwork. I don’t talk about my design work here as much but I have been working as a designer since 1994 across a variety of media and formats. My design and art practices heavily inform each other. Grow Curious was the fourth of Gayla’s books I designed.
We used Kickstarter to successfully fund a two-colour offset print run of 1200 copies. It was a labour of love and each of us pushed ourselves to make something special. We spent hours looking at paper samples to get just the right feel for the cover and interior pages.
Grow Curious is unique gardening book as Gayla wrote it from the perspective of a gardener who has discovered over the years that working and connecting with plants and ecology can have the reciprocal effect of understanding ourselves better. The book is filled with prompts and exercises to support new and experienced gardeners in exploring their gardens and themselves.
The design and artwork of Grow Curious was a combination of balancing skills I had confidence in with new ways of working and techniques that challenged what I knew. The book is filled with a mixture of representational illustration, textural accents, and hand-rendered text.
While the book is printed in green and dark brown spot colours, all of the artwork was created with various black-tinted media and then digitally made into monochrome files for printing.
I experimented with techniques like mono printing and augmented watercolour washes — like the introduction of salt to form crystalline blooms on paper. I wanted the artwork to feel raw and organic — for the whole book to feel of the garden.
In 2020, with the self-published run of Grow Curious sold out, we worked with Chronicle Books to create a new version of the book. Gayla rewrote and restructured the book and I redesigned and made mostly new art. This new edition of Grow Curious released in 2022 is a four-colour hardcover book with space within for it to work as a project book or journal.
The premise is the same but we wanted to shape our original work into a truly new form while preserving the intimate feeling of the original book we had put our hearts into.
Because the new edition is four-colour offset printed, my approach to the artwork especially was altered. Some of the original black artwork was digitally toned to pull into colour washes but much of the art was recreated with colour media.
I was still in an experimental mode as I explored how representational and how abstract we wanted this book to feel. Working with a publisher of course meant that there were another set of voices in that conversation as well.
The book has a constrained palette overall with the colour work mostly staying within greens and blues with subtle orange, yellow, and occasional pink tones coming in. Some illustrations warranted more realistic colour work while with others I ran digital gradients across monochrome artwork.
It is an interesting process working through the sets of design and aesthetic challenges that making any book will throw at you. Unlike my visual arts practice, every element of a book has to maintain a focus on the reader.
The artwork has a set of jobs just like the content and the formatting of the text. Artwork in a book might provide visual context or instruction and it might also contribute to the overall tone and feel of the book.
I’ve had the pleasure of doing this kind of work each time with a partner that I share so many other things with. We’ve been together for over 31 years now and so there is a trust and respect that goes both ways while we work. And while we do have our subtly different personal senses for things, most of the time we speak the same external and internal language.
I hope you’ve found this look at these two book projects interesting. Looking back the few years since they were completed, there is a good distance for me to see my own work and in both cases, I find very few problem areas or perceived flaws. This is a rarity for me as my inner critic is often most harsh in retrospect.
I’m distinctly proud of these books.
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If you would like to get your own copy of the Chronicle Books version of Grow Curious, it is available from most booksellers but here are a few direct links: