Base Brings Home Heavy Metal at Laus Awards

Our book-catalog for the 2008 André Kertesz exhibition at La Casa Encendida

Well, folks, it’s that time of year again, when we all get out our magnifying glasses and start burning ants. And when design awards are given out. We are proud to have been recognized by with five awards from the 38th edition of the Laus Awards for Graphic Design and Visual Communication, in five very different categories.

For our design of the book–catalog for the 2008 Espai Cultural Caja Madrid exhibition on photographer André Kertesz, Base was awarded the Gold. The book presents images and text on pages of different sizes, “hiding” them between sheets of matte black. It’s bound with a rustic, exposed binding.

We were also recognized with four silver awards from Laus, for several areas of activity. Base’s audiovisual department picked up a Silver—no Golds were given in the audiovisual category—for its immersive exhibition in the Thirst Pavilion at the 2008 World’s Fair, in Zaragoza, Spain. Along the exhibition’s 50 meter-long corridor, representing a dry river bed, Base played with the undulating surface of the walls, using  “stripes” of various sequences of stock footage.

In the category of book design, our catalog of the Gandhi exhibition at Madrid’s La Casa Encendida earned us a Silver. The variety of sources and materials included in the exhibition and book is reflected in the design through visual differentiation; texts, for example, are made to look as if they come directly from various books.

Laus also recognized Base for a project with design magazine Grrr, for which we created an application to produce 1,000 different covers constructed from parts of the faces of the magazine’s 20 creators. The result is 1,000 anonymous faces that only exist in Grrr. In addition, the header and the subheader of the cover are also randomized and every cover has its own serial number. Meanwhile, our work with Spanish fashion brand women’secret netted a Silver for the art direction of its autumn–winter 2008-09 collection, and a Bronze for the naming of its eau de toilette, w’eau.

.4% of the Grrr covers

w’eau, by women’secret

women’secret smiles