Book design, typesetting & marketing materials for old Japanese art book

During my time at Oak Knoll Books, I had the opportunity to work on many fine-press, artistic books, but the most magical was Exploring Japanese Books and Scrolls. This book required a jacket, title page, half-title page, foreword page, and copyright page designs. The theme of this book is: books as art, specifically books and scrolls of old Japan — the designs I created needed to match the handsomely produced book, and attempt to pay tribute to the art of these old Japanese books. The cover jacket features a painting taken from a large album by various Japanese artists, circa 1810. The background behind the painting is a magical close-up of calligraphy from an old scroll, with a striking orange background. The bright orange catches your eye, and the magical calligraphic shapes are mesmerizing. The background color made it a challenge, as it required many proofs from the printer to get the color right. However, ultimately it became a beautiful work of art. The typography on the cover and title pages was set carefully with carefully kerning between every character. The font had already been chosen and used for the book typesetting, which I carefully matched. The typesetting on the foreword page was fully justified, and required a careful distribution of characters in order to avoid hyphens, and gaps or rivers throughout the page. The marketing collateral continued the same vernacular, but I contrasted the background color to the rich blue used on the cloth cover of the actual book. This blue background made the orange book pop off the page.