Archaic Photography for the Digital Era
Daniel Carrillo
Archaic Photography for the Digital Era
About 10 weeks
InDesign, Illustrator,
Kindle Direct Publishing
Project Manager, Editor,
Typography, Layout
The artist created an extensive series of artist ambrotype (and tintype) portraits over the course of more than a decade. The design challenge revovled around presenting the portraits in a starkly contemporary layout while retaining the rich texture of the archaic photographic process.
The solution elevated the rich and textured images with generous amounts of negative space to allow the full sense of gravity and beauty. The tension between the 19th-century and 21st-century technologies was represented by pairing a sleek sans serif font with a much heavier serif that evoked the first golden age of photography.
The artist also needed a cost-effective approach to printing, and Kindle Direct Publishing offered a potential solution. The key sticking points included color matching images on the spreads (resolved by great digital images) and hacking the KDP system to ensure the page bleeds matched the InDesign files.
