IMO Precedents: Why the Book?

Starting on a Blank Page

Last week, we announced IMO - the first physical publication we’re planning to create for The Creative Crypto. Our initial magazine offering won’t just be some typical book launch. We’re instead looking to compile all of the latest innovations in art, provenance, authentification, creative production, and so on with the book asset itself. To make sure we do embody all of the relevant and necessary components, we’ll be doing a series of ‘precedent’ articles to explain and work though our creative process.

Today, we’re looking at books themselves - why we decided to great this particular form of information and past examples of innovative publications that approach the medium in an unexpected way.

Whitepapers are too Flat

Besides being a natural progression from the ‘magazine’ model of The Creative Crypto, our goal is first and foremost to capture the gravity of the creative space in blockchain. With new companies and technologies emerging every week, the industry can seem too ephemeral and risky, relying on cheesy tutorial videos and digital PDFs to build public trust. Just as milestone works like Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper and The Internet of Money by Andreas Antonopoulos bring legitimacy to blockchain as a whole, we recognized the need of some volume that verified the general direction of art marketplaces, NFT collectibles, and collaborative social media.

The "Book" as a Canvas for Creativity

IMO won’t just be a compilation of stories and writing. The book itself will integrate sculptural design elements, codes, crypto Easter Eggs, and more to be in itself a story and embodiment of what is going on in the crypto space. By playing with various features that often or only sometimes appear in books - i.e. images, composition, watermarks, flip-book elements - we can begin to integrate the existing and usable technologies, platforms, and games of the blockchain world.

We’ve written before on the design strategies that help nurture engagement, including this recent article on the role of UI/UX for Narrative’s social platform. Designing and experimenting with a book structure itself offers a level of refinement that is difficult to achieve with 12pt. Times New Roman. The goal for us is to not only create a thing that appeals to and excites existing crypto users, We’re going for the inverse - create a thing compelling and engaging enough to draw new people into our domain of thinking and working. As readers look through and explore each facet of the project and ask “how was this made?”, our answer will be proudly “with blockchain.”

One incredible precedent for reimagining what a book can be is “Absence” by Howeler + Yoon, a book dedicated to the World Trade Center and made of sectional cut-outs of the towers’ footprint from top down. The architecture firm integrated the physical form of the former monument while still utilizing the typical binding and single pages that usually seem limiting in its medium.

The book made headlines upon release, offering a model for inscribing the legacy of a historic moment in a reinvented medium, without a single printed word to distract from its spatial interpretation.

A book can be much more than a pile of words.

Layout, structure, progression, reference, design, spacing - these are all critical pieces of how a book comes together and new formulas can convey new messages. Experimentation will be a primary goal over the next few months as we take in both graphic and compositional designs of creative books in the past and come up with our own chemistry.