Ways of Being. Advice for Artists by Artists

Roger Excoffon’s Banco turns 70 in 2021. It doesn’t look a bit its age in Ways of Being (Advice for Artists by Artists), published by Laurence King in 2018.

What if you could sit down with your favourite artist and ask them anything you liked – Life? Work? Inspiration? Based on new interviews and archival material from a huge roster of artists, this book does exactly that. Is art a ‘career’, a vocation or something else entirely? Do you need a studio or a dealer, and how do you find one? Does financial success – or the lack of it – change you? Should you read the reviews? Encompassing every stage of an artist’s life – from early works to debut shows and mid- and late-career stages – this book allows artists to answer these key questions.

In the design by Bibliothèque, the dynamic caps that look like they were written with a window puller are paired with LL Unica77. Bibliothèque wanted the book “to resemble an instruction manual with each of the five chapters featuring two hand-cut thumb tabs, traditionally used for dictionaries. Working only with short texts, two colours [430 U Grey and 286 U Blue] and typefaces are used to create a visual hierarchy so as to allow easy navigation for the reader. The book also contains a number of bespoke infographics.”