Book Design For Vitra: The Anatomy Of A Design Company
Why match one chair’s red exactly—just for a book cover?
A Practice for Everyday Life designed the book 'Vitra: The Anatomy of a Design Company', written by Deyan Sudjic, to reflect Vitra’s cultural and social mission. The tactile, handbook-like format and layered, collage-style layouts celebrate the company’s multifaceted contributions to design while mirroring its collaborative ethos.
Insights
- A Practice for Everyday Life (APFEL) designed Vitra: The Anatomy of a Design Company (Phaidon), written by Deyan Sudjic, explicitly framing it “not a monograph, but a handbook” meant to inspire how a design company can operate—hence the smaller, tactile, functional format.
- The cover turns product-making into graphic language: it uses details of key Vitra products to spotlight inventive production techniques; the red is color-matched precisely to Jasper Morrison’s Evo-C chair (2020), and the Vitra logo is embossed to echo the physical mark found on Vitra products.
- Inside, APFEL follows Sudjic’s narrative-led chapters but breaks the expected corporate-chronology look with layered, collage-like image sequences; chapter openers use silhouettes of products and architectural elements to underline Vitra’s wide scope (product design through architecture).
- Typography is a unifying system across varied chapter treatments: the Diatype typeface family appears in multiple cuts, including a monospace style that deliberately references instruction manuals—reinforcing the “handbook” thesis.
- The design process mirrors Vitra’s own collaboration model (working with independent “authors”): the full APFEL team contributed layouts, with distinct chapter treatments plus inserts by Karen Stein and a photographic essay by Iwan Baan; the book itself spans 450+ pages and 400+ illustrations and situates Vitra’s network from Charles & Ray Eames to Gehry, Hadid, and Virgil Abloh, plus the Vitra Campus architecture (Tadao Ando, Herzog & de Meuron, Álvaro Siza).
