Portfolio

Manchester: Making the Modern City

Liverpool University Press (2016)
Crown 4to, 448pp

Work carried out: page design and make-up, cover design

Manchester: Making the Modern City was the next in LUP’s series of general-audience illustrated city histories, telling the story of the first industrial city from a range of different thematic perspectives.

Our brief was to complement rather than mimic the design of the previous Belfast volume, so we used roughly the same four-column grid but elaborated our own style template for typography and layout. Tempting as it was to use Industry as the highlight typeface, the design settled on Avenir, with Calluna for body text.

As this was an edited volume, with different authors variously using tables, charts, maps and sidebars in their chapters, a particular challenge was to integrate those elements into a cohesive whole, which we achieved through the use of a common ‘spot’ colour throughout.

The cover was a particularly restricted brief, with just the one photograph to choose from, no cropping permitted and no text to obscure the Town Hall so, with a hint of masking around the top of the spire, this one pretty much designed itself.

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