Pretty Pictures

Marian Bantjes Pretty Pictures
with a Foreword by Rick Poynor
272 pages
Hard cover
26 cm × 35cm (approx. 10.25 × 13.75 inches)
Printed in full colour throughout
about 800 colour illustrations
List price: £42 / $75
Release date: September 30, 2013
Published in the UK by Thames & Hudson, ISBN 9780500517000
Published in the USA by Metropolis Books (DAP Artbook), ISBN 978-1938922220

This is the monograph of my work. It comprises almost everything I did from 2003–2012. It took me a year to compile, design, write and produce (working once again with Lucas Dietrich from Thames & Hudson). It contains somewhere around 800 images, including sketches and rejected concepts, with descriptions of each project and my thoughts (often painfully honest) on each.

While many monographs truly are just books of pictures, I wanted to create a book that answered many of the questions people ask me about my work, and showed both the process of some of the pieces and the progress and development of my career over the past 10 years. This book is full on intense. It's not the type of thing you flip through and absorb at a sitting. In my usual manner, it is dense with imagery and information. The book may seem expensive but you get a complete wealth of information.

I was also thrilled to have Rick Poynor agree to write a Foreword to the book, and in this he exceeded my expectations. I couldn't ask for a nicer Foreword by a more eminent person.

Pretty Pictures is arranged chronologically. Each year begins with a synopsis of how I felt about that year's work. Projects are listed by the month they were completed, with descriptions of the work, how the job went and my opinion of the final, with significant projects expanded to include sketches and other elements of the process where useful.

While most art and design books are designed around a strict grid system, I needed more flexibity than this could afford. Because the book contains so many projects, some important and some minor, and because I already had a chronological structure I decided to allow myself to put the projects in any size that made sense and create structure out of each page spread. I allowed some fudging on the time scale (perhaps by a month) to accomodate interesting parallels between work and the visual balance of pages. This made things harder for myself than plopping things into grid spaces, but it makes a much more dynamic and interesting design overall.

Reviews

“Pretty Pictures — a magnificent and monumental six-pound monograph that is, of course, far more than what the irreverently literal title suggests, inviting us into a life’s-work wonderland of enchantment, beauty, thoughtfulness, opinionation, and imaginative defiance of convention
[…] absolutely stunning, at once a treasure trove of visual mesmerism and a fascinating glimpse into one of the most singular, inventive, and influential minds in contemporary design.”
— Brain Pickings, “Beyond Pretty Pictures: Marian Bantjes on Serendipity, Success, and the Whimsy of Design”

“It's a bold decision to title a collection of your life's work to date with what could be taken as a dismissive criticism of it. But calling her new book Pretty Pictures, as suggested by the designer Rick Valicenti, captures perfectly the character of Marian Bantjes, who has both the confidence and wit to confront the slight head on – in shiny mirrored silver cover stock.
[…] Just as the metallic cover reveals a surprise underneath, Bantjes' book offers up plenty of her thinking behind how and why she does what she does. She has said the book is partly a way of explaining the processes that led to the work she is often asked about; so that she can move on. While she does that, it would be wise to enjoy the fruits of her last ten years in the pages of this beautifully produced, highly personal book.”
— Creative Review, “We Wonder”

“In the Venn diagram of art and graphic design, Marian Bantjes has more reason than most to be placed smack in the middle of the all-important overlap. The Canadian’s intricate, unashamedly maximalist work sits proudly at the intersection of these sometimes uncomfortable bedfellows and her new monograph is a terrific celebration of what Rick Poynor in the book’s introduction calls her “explosive graphic invention.”
— It’s Nice That, “Stunning new Marian Bantjes monograph celebrates a decade of her inimitable work”