Leporello photobooks et al.

This is a story more than a project… Or maybe not. Some years ago, when we decided to settle our studio in Rome, we discovered Leporello bookshop. Leporello is a special place for us, we spent, and actually we continue to spend, a lot of time in this place. We love to buy books there and we also discuss a lot with Chiara Capodici, founder and owner, about design, photography, art, architecture and also other funny stuff. The first time we stepped in the bookshop, we were surprised about the selection of books and we discovered the huge amount of events organized, as books’ presentations, talks etc.

So, when we have been invited to design the bookshop’s website we were very happy. From the beginning, we knew that it would be an hard work for us, but we accepted the challenge.

One of the aim was to coniugate the books selling and the events, the two main and interconnected activities of the bookshop. We discussed with Mosne, the developers of the webiste, about the architecture of the website that should have came to light both of those aspects in the same way. Once we found a good strategies, we began to design the website, starting from one of the fixed points: we had to keep the typeface of the bookshop’s logotype, Trade Gothic.

The website has a simple layout, an editorial approach to facilitate browsing to the users, but with a unconventional use of typography: big presence of typeface, stressed or set to zero margins, use of asymmetric grid and unbalanced black/white ratio etc. All those elements, and others of course, helped us to translate its physical identity and to create a brand new digital identity for the bookshop. We decided also to not use any color to emphasize the subject: the beautiful covers and contents of the books, always showed with photos.

For the book’s page, we decided to design the items tridimensionally. This automation, based on the ratio between the size and the number of pages of the item, is a trick useful to perceive the physicality of the book the users are buying. Beyond standard books, Leporello offers in fact some rare editions, ad hoc designed single sheet products and other very interesting stuff.