BOOK DESIGN
ILLUSTRATION
Agency: d6
Client: Balay
Title: Una historia de nuestra Historia
2016
Balay’s 90 year book design project has not only been the longest and most intense project I have ever worked on, it has also marked a milestone in my life as a designer. After this project I discovered that editorial design was one of my favorites and that I wanted to make books, in contrast to the increasingly digital world that we are living in.
From the beginning we were clear that we were going to make a coffee table book, in the style of the art books that are so fashionable to have in the livingrooms. For the design we were inspired by the industrial theme of the brand and we looked for a style attached to the base grid of 12 columns, very straight and square, very Bauhaus.
Almost eight months of absolute dedication to the project, a lot of pressure with deadly delivery times, an innumerable amount of text changes and the change of the size of the book when we were well into the layout.
Retouching of hundreds of photos, clippings and retouching of innumerable frames taken directly from digitized video, after viewing the brand’s historic TV spots; script transcription of the selected spots; illustration of the brand history timeline and creation of the two home appliance timelines. Everything to build this 354-page mammoth.
The work was laborious, but throughout the entire project I was excited by the amount of wonderful historical material that I had in my hands, a different and original way of learning about the industrial and advertising history of Spain.
Illustrations and timelines
At the center of the book is a 1.15m long window display of the brand’s timeline, filled with milestones in innovation and advertising and a series of world historical milestones to put them in context. The milestones of the brand are photographs, the historical milestones are illustrations that I made expressly for this project, very fun to do.
Two timelines were also made, one for washing machines and the other for stoves and kitchens, historical products, distinctive of the brand.
Some cover sketches:
The original design of the cover was all white with the historical logos in dry blow, highlighted with varnish, and included a translucent blue methacrylate box, we also proposed printed cardboard box versions, at the end, on the recommendation of the agency, it was made in blue and we do without the box.
