Concept design

VIKA will review your book concept, your work to date, listen to your ideas, and understand your ambitions for your project before giving you constructive feedback and bespoke concept designs.

The aim is get your project meaningfully nearer to publication. By the end of this process, you should have a good understanding of the direction that the book would take and how we will collaborate before we start the editorial or design process.

£500+VAT

VIKA designs books and brands that showcase the work of the artists and organisations of the future. We combine the conceptual rigour of book arts and the high production values of fine art publishing with the dynamism and connectivity of creative technologies. — Comparing book design and print quality on a range of selected books

Phase 1: Download your brain into ours

VIKA will look through your visuals, texts, and any other material, like existing books or designs you enjoy, to maximise our insight into and understanding of your work.

Every project is different. In order to work out what kind of book best suits you, VIKA will assess a range of variables from whether you have enough material to make a book —and, if not, what work would need to be done— to which presented ideas are and are not possible, conceptually and practically. Examples include, possible binding styles, materials, expectations for budgets, or different artistic techniques and processes.

Things we suggest you supply are:

— Your latest edit
— The wider edit
— One example of a typical high-res image
— Any text/captions
— Examples of books you like
— A PDF book layout (if you have one)
— Any infos about your printer and the spec/estimate

Once we’ve gone through this, we will arrange a 121 online chat with director, Victoria Forrest. This is your opportunity to talk through the work, and our opportunity to ask any questions about the work, its audience, and your ambitions for your business, career, or organisation.

A wooden floor from above showing a book splayed into a circle, shaped like a star. VIKA Books. Concept design service. — Format suggestion for Mimi Mollica’s *Moon City*

Phase 2: Concept designs and next steps

VIKA will revert with a simple report after our research. This will include an assessment of the work supplied to us, and ideas of what the book could look like, if we were to work together on it. If we get that far, then we can start to look at production estimates. Each book is unique.

Examples of the types of work VIKA has done in this phase are:

Project 1
Collect paper and material samples, create an editorial concept for book photo-editorial, find authors for your texts, create new photo-editorial concept

Project 2
Reorganise the archive for book editorial, create an editorial concept to guide future photoshoots, create a new photo edit from the wider edit.

Project 3
Research binding techniques, get comparative print quotes, create new photo-editorial concept and new wide edit, create a new photo edit from the wider edit, feedback on current design PDF.

A close up from Paul Graham's book Does Yellow Run Forever. It shows a close up of a the top half of a page of an open book. The image shows an area of a printed photograph with a shiny gloss over the image, on a flat white page. The image shows the effect of gloss lamination over an photograph. VIKA Books. Concept Design service — The printing technique of gloss lamination over an image from Paul Graham’s *Does Yellow Run Forever*

Victoria is a joy to work with. Both her concept ideas and understanding of my requirements were first rate, and she truly works in collaboration with you to elevate your initial ideas into something extraordinary.
Guy Bellingham, photographer
Your experience and insight is much appreciated, as is the revised image edit.

Frances McAllister, photographer