81. BBK STUDIO
“The concept was to suggest or ask questions about the role of design in business, what it means to be a designer, to design,” says Kevin Budelmann, creative director of BBK Studio of the awards book for the Detroit chapter of the AIGA. To address this issue, BBK utilized several components that “suggest something about the process of making and what it means to make something for your client.” The cover shows the actual hand of, presumably, a designer, while the interior type is made of intentionally nonaligned block letterforms. “There’s a lot of preciousness in the design world,” Budelmann notes. “We wanted to call attention to the fact that just about everything is designed and ask about the nature of design. We wanted it to feel handmade, to show the trace of a human.”

In a nod to the designer audience, section breaks are robins-egg-blue pages with vaguely human forms shaped from the counterspaces of a stencil set. “There are people who play with type all day and would appreciate this as an inside joke,” says Budelmann. But the real stars of the book are the awards. And they are given room to shine on oversized pages framed by a white band that contains the “whodunit” along with a comment on strategy and execution.
Laurel Saville