The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2024
Kunst am Buch makes Hans Burkhardt's archive boxes the design of its digital library
The Kunst am Buch website echoes Burkhardt's coloured, sized archive boxes, so browsing the bindings feels like opening the collection itself.
Archive
What it had to solve
'Kunst am Buch' — 'the art of the book' — is a series of specialist bindings by artists and designers, collected by Hans Burkhardt out of his rich experience at the Zürich bookbindery Bubu. The task was to translate this physical trove to the digital.
How it works
'Kunst am Buch' — 'the art of the book' — collects specialist bindings made by artists and designers, gathered by Hans Burkhardt out of his rich experience at the Zürich bookbindery Bubu. Each artefact lived in his archive in its own uniquely coloured and sized box.
When the collection moved to the web, the design refused the usual flat gallery grid. Instead the site echoes Burkhardt's storage system: a pixel-built spectrum of rectangular motifs represents each featured object, staying true to its shape and scale as visitors browse.
Each box can then be opened through filters of cover, content or artist, with a tool to zoom into detailed hi-res imagery. The physical trove translates to the digital while keeping the logic of the archive itself, and the work is catalogued in the D&AD awards archive.
Why it lands
- The archive box was already a perfect interface: colour and size carried information about each binding before a visitor read a single word.
- Keeping true shape and scale made the digital collection honest to the physical one, so browsing online still conveys what the objects actually are.
- Filters for cover, content or artist opened the boxes along the paths a collector or researcher would actually take.
- Hi-res zoom made the screen do what a vitrine cannot: let a visitor study a binding's craft in detail without handling it.
What it did
The physical trove gained a digital form that preserves the collector's way of organising it: shape and scale stay honest to the originals, hi-res imagery invites close study, and the work is catalogued in the D&AD awards archive.
What you can take
When a collection goes digital, its physical organising system is a design asset: keep the collector's own storage logic as the interface and visitors inherit their way of seeing.
Since then
For Hans Burkhardt's collection, the website became the digital counterpart of a lifetime's archive: bindings that once lived only in coloured boxes in Zürich could be opened, filtered and studied by anyone online. The work was catalogued in the D&AD awards archive, where it stands as an example of translating a physical system of order into a browsing experience.
Sources
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card