The exterior of the book is executed entirely in matte white type and gloss clear foils on 4-ply gray binder’s board, which is then laminated to the front and back covers of the book block. This is partly a punt (how do you represent a broad survey with the work of just one artist?), and partly an effort to push a sense of materiality: as abstract painting tends to be about the medium itself, we decided to lead with the materials of the object up front.

Large detail of Grant Hottle’s painting Marsyas (2015), cropped so tightly as to strip it of any possible context, leaving the reader with only color and surface.

At transition points, the book shows large fields of flat color derived from the illustrated works themselves; here, on the table of contents, a yellow-orange from Jack Featherly’s Fax Generation (2015) . . .

. . . and here a pale blue from Featherly’s Unpattern #2 (2015). Display typography is large but recedes into the ground, with only the type sitting on top. There’s a fat-over-lean visual metaphor going on here, though we may be the only ones who see it.

Text is arranged asymmetrically with a generous left margin for illustrations, which are placed as close as possible to their references within the essay.

At the turn between the first essay and the individual artist pages is a gatefold containing a visual representation of the artists’ origins and influences organized along several axes: in the upper half, the artists—all now Northwest residents—are distributed from west to east according to the time zones in which they were born  . . .

. . . and along the bottom are the names of various arts movements and media and related practitioners. Each artist was assigned a color—subjectively drawn from their work—which keyed their subsequent appearance in the text.

Apart from contextual appearances within the book’s two essays, each artist is allotted six pages, a biography, and a statement. Works are shown in relative scale within the artist’s section  . . .

. . . and positioned within the pages to give each work appropriate white space. Caption information is assigned to a horizontal axis along the book’s lower third.