InDesigners: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich and Matteo Bologna

If a central feature of Adobe software is cross-application compatibility, then Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich and Matteo Bologna are the embodiment of that collaboration. De Vicq, senior art director and vice president of HarperCollins Publishing, is an Illustrator virtuoso, crafting imaginative portraits out of letters. Bologna, founder of Mucca Design and art director for Rizzoli in Milano as well as several HarperCollins imprints, performs layout magic in InDesign. Together they create designs that contain multiple layers of text and subtext. Their 2004 collaboration is a study in pushing the limits of InDesign. Words at Play explores the confluence of personality, typography, content, and design. De Vicq, the intellectual, chose quotes about words and language from 21 authors and public figures. Bologna, the droll designer, created layouts that underscore the meaning of the phrases as well as highlights different features of InDesign. For example, a quote by Vladimir Nabokov about the author’s duty to make unseen ideas visible through words is set against a backdrop of transparent letters. Central to each spread is a de Vicq portrait of the author composed out of the characters contained in his or her name and created in a typeface that reflects the author’s personality. Franz Kafka’s portrait, for instance, is set in the jittery Adobe font, Quake, which reflects the nervous author’s paranoia. To create Words at Play, De Vicq made the portraits in Illustrator and handed off the live ?les to Bologna who then placed them in InDesign. Bologna converted the letter portraits to outlines in InDesign. “InDesign’s Bezier curves management is better than Illustrator’s,” says Bologna, a former FreeHand user. Adds de Vicq, “Being able to have live pieces of Illustrator in InDesign made a big difference in how the pages were put together.” Two layouts stand out in the designers’

minds: William Shakespeare and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Shakespeare spread, which plays off the quote that “a rose by any other word would smell as sweet,” includes a complex table of flower names coupled with their meanings. De Vicq notes that previously he was “terrified of tables,” but that InDesign has changed that for him. Bologna points to the Wittgenstein spread as the most difficult to lay out: the philosopher’s quote about the symbolism of language is set against a grid of 1,200 OpenType glyphs. “It was very slow to produce,” he says. The two met while exercising their dogs in 1994 and formed a professional collaboration shortly thereafter. Bologna had offered to help with the website for De Vicq’s Bembo’s Zoo, a children’s alphabet book of animals presented in his signature letter-portrait technique (bemboszoo.com). They have since worked on hundreds of HarperCollins titles together. WordsatPlay took more than two years—and two versions of InDesign—to complete. Both men use InDesign exclusively in their daily work as well. De Vicq says that working in InDesign is like working in Illustrator: “Sometimes I have to say, ‘Which software am I working in?’” Bologna, who also designs fonts, extols OpenType in InDesign as “the best thing in the world. You have all these interesting glyphs you didn’t have access to before.” And after this project, these two have probably seen them all.

Author: Franz Kafka. Portrait font: Quake. Technique featured: Eyedropper Tool.

Author: Gustave Flaubert. Portrait font: Nuptial Script. Technique featured: Nested Styles.

Author: Herman Melville. Portrait font: Poetica. Technique featured: Text Wrap.

Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Portrait font: Giddyup. Technique featured: Glyphs Panel.

Author: William Shakespeare. Portrait font: Wittenberger Fraktur. Technique featured: Tables.