sonya dyakova

(top to bottom: nobuyoshi araki, sculpture now, story of art: pocket edition, photo trouvée)


i knew of Story of Art as that ugly, bulky tome every art history student has to lug around and, to great disdain, digest as if holy word of western academia. but when i saw it redesigned, no -- metamorphized -- into the delicate paperback, subtly monochrome, with pages as thin as air (quite like a bible, actually) i for once imagined buying it and in fact ... reading it. well, maybe more like grasping it in my palm and turning its wispy pages on a hot, pensive but leisurely day, enjoying how much its texture matched my mood. it is truly an incredible feat for a graphic designer to re-render an unruly brick of text into a book both readable and pleasurable. more pressing in my mind was this question: who did this?

much to my delight, last week i discovered a number of my favorite covers over at phaidon were art directed by ONE individual: sonya dyakova. she does not seem to have a personal site, but is canonized at the ripe young age of thirty-three with a wikipedia entry.