On Publishing collects interviews with over 20 designer-publishers on the state of independent publishing today.
Originally conceived as a booklet for the SFMOMA Small Press Book Bazaar! at the end of 2019, during the COVID-19 pandemic the project was adapted as a print-on-demand website which launched in early 2021.
To learn more about the topic of design-publishing, we interviewed designers from around the world, asking questions such as "How and why do you publish?", "What challenges do publishers face today?", and "What is a “radical” model of publishing?". We then collected those responses into a website that can be "Published-on-Demand".
The project's design focuses on the relationship between the printed and web artifact. The website uses an over-arching page metaphor, linear structure, and a table of contents and a colophon to reference the book object, while also employing dynamic attributes and supernatural visuals to take advantage of its web properties. The book on the other hand allows the user to select which sections of the website are compiled, while also generating a unique cover design every time the website is formatted as a book. Although the printed book has dynamic – web-driven – properties, the design is retooled with the physical reading experience in mind.
