The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2023
Guardian Art Book Fair 2023 gives books a face made of opened pages and eyes
Guardian Art Center's 2023 book fair identity fuses abstract opened-book patterns with eye motifs into a book-shaped face: reading as an act of seeing.
Guardian Art Center
What it had to solve
Guardian Art Center's 2023 art book fair needed a visual identity built around books. The design idea rests on a perceptual observation: depending on the reader's perspective, a book can look planar or three-dimensional, so the fair's image could play between the two.
How it works
Guardian Art Center's 2023 art book fair asked for an identity about books before anything else. The concept starts from a perceptual observation: a book can appear planar or three-dimensional depending on the reader's perspective, so the image of a book is never fixed — it is completed by whoever looks at it.
The fair's visuals are built from the abstract patterns of opened books and then combined with eye patterns. Together they form a book-shaped face, an image described as an extension of the human body. The eye carries the argument: for tens of thousands of years, in the east and the west, the eye has been one of civilization's most valued visual symbols, so pairing it with the opened book makes reading itself an act of seeing.
The result is an identity with one memorable figure — the book that looks back at its reader. D&AD recorded the work in its awards archive under Branding; the archive carries no attendance or business figures, so the case stands on the concept.
Why it lands
- One fused figure — book plus eye — communicates the fair's entire subject without showing a single literal shelf of books.
- The planar-versus-three-dimensional idea gives the identity a built-in game that changes with the reader's perspective.
- Grounding the eye in millennia of eastern and western symbolism lets the fair carry a large cultural claim in one mark.
- A book-shaped face is repeatable across the fair's visuals while remaining unmistakably about books.
What it did
The fair was presented through one memorable figure — the book that looks back at its reader — giving the event a single, ownable visual idea. D&AD recorded the identity in its awards archive under Branding; no attendance or business figures accompany the entry, so the case rests on the concept.
What you can take
For an event about books, let the medium supply the metaphor: an opened book's abstract pattern fused with an eye turns reading into seeing and gives every visual one face.
Since then
The book-shaped face became the visual signature of the 2023 edition, and the identity entered D&AD's awards archive under Branding, where it remains documented. The archive records no attendance or sales figures for the fair, so this entry claims none; the transferable idea is to build an event's identity from the conceptual core of the event itself — here, that a book only becomes three-dimensional when someone reads it.
Sources
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