Regular followers of this blog will know that my first post of every month is a "job from the past" so that I can show some of the really good work from years gone by...
Design for Life - DixonBaxi 2004
DixonBaxi is the studio established by Simon Dixon and Aporva Baxi in 2001. Having both worked at
Attik, they set up their new studio as a partnership, to be just the two of them, working without the trappings of a large agency. Throughout the 2000's, they consistently delivered exciting and innovative design, art direction and branding, predominately for television. Their work for MTV, SciFi Channel, Five and Formula One was high profile and lauded within the industry.
Rather than produce big flashy studio brochure, the two partners deliberately produced a modest portfolio piece to show the work that they had recently produced for clients with a title reflecting their philosophy: design for life
The size is A6 (105x148mm) landscape and is perfect bound with a lovely, neat, square 4mm spine. The cover is printed on StarFine 200gsm, printed in the bright magenta.
The text is made up using "French-folded" sections on Offenbach Bible 50gsm which gives it a sensational light feel and flows beautifully in the hand. 'French Folding' is where the folded edges are on the fore-edge of the book, as in the picture below:
Of course 'french - folding' uses more paper - in fact double the amount! - so this job is actually in conventional terms a 64pp text, which is actually 32x 4pp French folded sections, so in actuality its 128pp! ...but of course it's on 50gsm, so it's only a 4mm spine.
The spreads are sublime, the information pages printed in solid magenta and the project with images from their projects over the previous three years...
Bearing in mind much of the imagery used is from RGB screen grabs, the reproduction is really good, below is the work for MTV...
...and on an introduction spread, no words or image at all - just magenta space!
...you can see the way the text pages rolling and flopping over, flowing superbly.
It was printed offset litho by FS Moore in London and they really made a superb job of it. Richard Davey handled the project and he is now Sales Director at
DG3/Leycol.
Design is, of course, by DixonBaxi. Simon and Aporva absolutely loved the finished piece and Simon was kind enough to send me file copies and a handwritten note...
DixonBaxi are now a much larger agency with 30 staff, still headed by Simon and Aporva, so sadly as is the way with bigger studios I no longer have regular contact with the two founders but it's great to have played a small part in the studio's development and history.
http://dixonbaxi.com/
http://www.leycol.com/
Posted by Justin Hobson 02.11.2017
This is a lovely project which was produced last year at Christmas time. I received a call from Richard Davey at London based printer Leycol, who asked if we could supply a 60gsm in a red and black paper. We discussed the project further and it turned out that paper was to be printed with a metallic gold text and sent to Italy to wrap the traditional Panettone cake for sale in the Wildwood Deli.
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