Blackbook Publications is an artist book collective, established in Gothenburg in 2009. The collective is a group of artists, including Simon Berg, Emanuel Cederqvist, Kalle Sanner, Agnes Thor and Lotta Törnroth. To date, Blackbook have published books and other printed material by artists from the scene of contemporary photography in Scandinavia. In addition to publications from the members of collective, Blackbook have published books by artists such as Annika von Hausswolff and Linda Hofvander, Johan Markusson and Signe Vad.
In 2017, Blackbook Publications turned to Lundgren+Lindqvist for a complete redesign of their webshop. Apart from restructuring, designing and building the new webshop, the projects also included reshooting all the books published by the collective and overlooking the visual identity.
The webshop’s menu offers alternative ways of accessing the content, where books can be sorted after artist, or accessed through their titles. Instead of a traditional ‘about’ section, we opted for integrating the profile text and contact information into the menu overlay, allowing the visitor to quickly access the information without having to switch between different sections and leave the one that really matters; the presentation of the books. Upon scrolling down, the menu items (Books, Artists, Blog, Profile and Contact) are animated leaving only the initial B (of Books), B (of Blog) and P (of Profile) behind. The two latter are subsequently animated to attach to the initial B, together forming BBP for Blackbook Publications.
The webshop is built on the Shopify platform, and with its very dynamic product grid it proved to be an exercise in what can be achieved using a stable and friendly, but somewhat rigid, system.
