A Brief Talk on the Morphology of Modern Books and Lu Style (I)

Like traditional culture, the design and production of books in China has a very decent history. "Bone Pack", "Bright Policy", "Reel Loading", "Fold-fit (Spiral Leaf)", "Butterfly Pack", "Back Pack", "Line Pack", etc. not only constitute a magnificent variety of books. The history of form creation, and, in a sense, they are also a symbol of Chinese civilization. It can be said that in this respect, our heritage is very rich. However, in recent decades, the book industry's situation has not been optimistic. It has been plagued by old ideas and systems. It has been lagging behind in the business of “cover design” for a long time and has been lagging far behind Europe and the United States. The level of the day. Dissatisfied with this status quo, Lu Jingren and his colleagues, with pioneering courage and rational introspection, began the revolution in book morphology, pushing traditional bookbinding to the heights of book form value construction. Accumulated for several years, there have been great achievements. It can be said bluntly that the creation of book forms by Lu Jingren and colleagues for more than a decade has constituted a watershed between traditional and modern decoration industries. Among them, Lu Jingren's unique design concept, implicit humanistic meaning, and distinctive visual style have become a book designer who has a great influence on the book industry. The "Lu's style" thus formed has also become a book. A unique cultural landscape in the bounding world.

Conceptual change is the precursor to the reform of book shape design. Lu Jingren believes that the breakthrough in the design of book forms depends on the breakthrough in traditional narrow-minded concepts. The creation of modern book forms must address two conceptual preconditions: First, "the shaping of books is not a bookmaker's patent, it is a systematic project completed by publishers, editors, designers, and printers;" The book form is a double structure that includes "shape" and "look". The former is the physical structure of the book. It constitutes the beauty of the book's intuitive stillness in terms of beauty, convenience, and practicality; the latter is the rational structure of the book. It is rich in information, scientific and reasonable composition, incredible creativity, and organized The level, ups and downs of the melody, the full complement of the graphic and text, the creation of subconscious inspiration and the full use of various elements, constitutes the flow of book content activation of the United States. The perfect combination of styling and demeanor creates a book with both physical and spiritual values, and vitality and preservation value. It goes without saying that this concise understanding is of inspirational significance to the Chinese book industry. It not only requires that book designers stand at the height of system theory to cut into the creation of books, thus focusing on a series of issues such as the intrinsic and external, macro and micro, text and images, design and process flow of books, and, more importantly, It solves the basic idea of ​​the existence and development of book morphology: the dual structure of the coexistence of form and spirit of the book form. In particular, the concept of "reasonable structure" in the book can be said to greatly enhance the cultural content of book form design, and fully expand the space for book form design. The design of book form has thus shifted from one-way to multi-directionality, and the functions of books have also undergone a revolutionary transformation: the horizontal, vertical, and multi-directional diffuse reflections from the planar structure of unidirectional knowledge transfer to knowledge. The multiple transmission structure. The reader will obtain the knowledge capacity value beyond the book from the book, and feel the web of wisdom formed by the dots, lines, and faces in the book.

In the view of Lu Jingren, the rational construction of the arrival book has two paths: one is the artistic road based on the process of emotional creation, and the other is the path of engineering based on information accumulation, overall composition, and technology. Lu Jingren believes that the latter is more important. “The book designer's perceptual artistic feeling alone is not enough, but he must also apply the concepts of ergonomics to perfect and supplement. Engineering is divided into three aspects: First, imagination and design thinking triggered by the original works. It constitutes the point of enlightenment of reading materials, and on this basis, creatively composes words, images, colors, and materials, creates a book form with new style features with rational understanding, and finally, enters the process flow and realizes the design of books. The overall idea. To be precise, `work is the concrete system of the rational construction of books.' This link was incorporated into the creation system of the entire book form, which fully explained the systematicness and completeness of the literary morphology of Lu Jingren.

If these ideas constitute the ideological foundation of Lü Jingren's book form design, then he will completely transform this idea into a distinctive character in his long-term design practice, which constitutes the unique "Lu style" of the book-packing industry. Specifically, Lu's style has such prominent features.

Integrity. In each design idea, Lu Jingren always rationally put texts, images, colors, materials, and other elements into the overall structure on the basis of the original information. Even a decorative symbol, a page number, or a figure number is no exception. In this way, each element in the overall structure glows with greater expression than the single symbol, and thus constitutes the continuity of the visual form, inducing readers to enter the reading state with continuous smooth visual fluidity. The voluminous "The Complete Collection of Chinese Folk Art" is a typical example of this kind of design. The 14 volumes of the book all adopt a unified book shading, cover format, ring-backing paper, chapter-separated pages, core twisting lines and prompt symbols, and each sub-volume is divided into color code, sub-volume images, and spot colors. The markers and the inner page color palette show the personality in the common and the changes in the whole, so that the volumes not only maintain the lateral continuity but also have a vertical continuity, resulting in an orderly flow of the entire book.


(to be continued)