Traditions & vernacular · 2003–present · East Asia

Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China')

Also known as Zhongguo zui mei de shu (中国最美的书, 'The Most Beautiful Books of China') book design, Beauty of Books in China, Chinese book design (shuji sheji, 书籍设计)

Chinese book design since 2003, when Shanghai founded the yearly 'Most Beautiful Books of China' award, whose winners go on to Leipzig. The whole book is designed as an object to handle: sewing bared on an open spine, roughened or deckled edges, coloured or gilded fore-edges, blind-pressed marks, leaves left closed at the fold, accordion and loose-sheet formats. Vertical and horizontal Chinese text, ink painting and quiet photography sit in wide margins on cream, kraft and ribbed papers, often with a single red.

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A sample layout drawn from the style’s design choices, until its AI image is made.

Use it with care

Have every Chinese character set and proofread by a fluent reader: image models invent pseudo-characters, and mirrored or random hanzi used as texture read as nonsense. These are recent designs by living designers and publishers, so commission or credit them rather than copying a prize-winning book's structure wholesale, never present a generated image as one of the award winners, and do not crop reproduced scripture, classics or calligraphy into decoration.

How it works

Design the whole object, not just the cover (shuji sheji rather than zhuangzhen): choose paper, binding, edges, wrapper and case as carefully as the page.
Leave the binding visible: sew the book with thread on an open spine and let the thread, string, raffia or felt wrap show.
Slow the reader down through the hands: leave leaves closed at the fold and add accordion folds, fold-outs, loose sheets and booklets that must be opened.
Finish the edges: roughen or deckle them, colour or gild the fore-edge, and leave some marks blind or some pages empty.
Set Chinese vertically or horizontally, or both in one book, in wide margins, with one red or a few muted inks on cream, kraft or ribbed paper.
Take the material from the subject: a woodcut cover for a book of woodcut New Year prints, food-wrapping paper for old trades, crepe for a book on dance.

Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing. The 'Most Beautiful Books of China' (Beauty of Books in China) competition was founded in 2003 and is held every year by the Shanghai Press and Publication Administration; in 2017 it drew 312 books from 94 publishers and chose 25, judged above all on 'how a book reflects the essence and unique qualities of Chinese culture', and its winners represent China at the 'Best Book Design from all over the World' competition that Stiftung Buchkunst runs in Leipzig (held there since 1963). Chinese books won the Leipzig gold medal in 2004 (a picture album of Mei Lanfang's theatre performances) and in 2016, the organisers' own catalogue The Beauty of Books in China 2010–2012 received an honorary appreciation in 2014, and Chinese books took awards in every Leipzig round from 2016 to 2026 except 2023. Lü Jingren (born Shanghai 1947) studied under Kohei Sugiura in Japan in 1989 and 1993 and brought back Sugiura's view of the book as a three-dimensional, dynamic system built from the elements of its contents. In 1996 his 'Book Design Four-Person Exhibition' (书籍设计四人展) with Ning Chengchun, Wu Yong and Zhu Hong first called for a move from zhuangzhen (装帧, binding and cover decoration) to shuji sheji (书籍设计, design of the whole book). He founded his studio in 1998, has taught at Tsinghua University's Academy of Arts and Design since 2002, won the Chinese award 13 times and judged at Leipzig in 2014. Nanjing is the other centre: Zhu Yingchun, design director of Nanjing Normal University Press, and the Phoenix publishing houses, whose books are designed by Zhao Qing or by Qu Minmin and Jiang Qian (QQQQ Design) and often printed by Shanghai Artron. A 2020 study of 371 winners over 17 years named five signature techniques: exposed thread-sewn spines, roughened edges, shaped cutting, coloured fore-edges and 空白印刷 ('blank printing'), which its abstract does not define.

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition: Column grid characteristic
Dynamic asymmetry characteristic
Isolated object characteristic
Framed panels occasional
Full bleed occasional
Classical text block occasional
Space & hierarchy: Generous white space defining
Sequential narrative defining
Layered information occasional
Single focal point occasional
Typography: Rotated & vertical setting characteristic
Transitional serif characteristic
Brush & pen calligraphy characteristic
Wide letterspacing occasional
Humanist & Garalde serif occasional
Colour: Light ground characteristic
Earth & mineral characteristic
Limited spot colours characteristic
Monochrome characteristic
Analogous harmony occasional
Jewel & metallic occasional
Form & shape: Rectilinear characteristic
Biomorphic curves occasional
Naturalistic depiction occasional
Non-representational occasional
Surface & texture: Paper & letterpress bite defining
Painterly brushwork characteristic
Carved line occasional
Ornament: Restrained accents defining
Rules & bars occasional
Floral & vegetal occasional
Imagery: Painterly illustration characteristic
Straight photography characteristic
Line illustration occasional
Typography only occasional
Medium & production: Offset printing defining
Textile & craft characteristic
Woodblock & linocut occasional
Tone & intent: Calm & contemplative defining
Nostalgic & retro characteristic
Luxurious & glamorous characteristic
Playful & witty occasional
Avoids: Skeuomorphic material, Gloss & highlights, Chrome & 3D render, Fluorescent & neon, Complementary clash, Horror vacui, Abundant decoration, Flat vector illustration

Palette

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Typefaces

Song (Songti), imitation-Song (Fangsong) and Kai (Kaiti, a common printing face modelled on handwritten regular script) text type, the standard faces of the Chinese book, for vertical or horizontal text; Order – The Story of Fangyuan Bookshop (2016) runs its script both ways in one book
Characters taken from old woodcut-printed books, used as subheads in The Art of Gardening (2018) to give the new page a calligraphic flavour
Brush calligraphy reproduced on thin rice or ribbed Chinese paper
Pleasure of Learning, 2016; Tea Canon, 2018
Latin Antiqua capitals for bilingual titles, engraved into the bottom edge of Ink Rubbing by Leng Bingchuan
2017

Known for

Zhu Yingchun, Bu Cai
(不裁, 'Uncut'), named a 'World's Most Beautiful Book' in 2007 (Chinese press reports it was chosen at Leipzig from 545 books from 33 countries), whose leaves the reader slits open with a paper knife made in the book, an idea taken from the untrimmed (毛边) book; and Yi Yi (蚁呓, 'Ant Murmurs', 2007), a picture book he created and designed, left largely blank so that it can be kept as a notebook, which Chinese sources report as a special award of 2008, variously credited to Leipzig or to the German Commission for UNESCO (Nanjing City of Literature; Global People; Yangtse Evening Post)
Li Jin (design), Order – The Story of Fangyuan Bookshop (Lv Chonghua; Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House), Leipzig Gold Medal 2016
Japanese-bound creamy paper in olive raffia covers, red writing and drawings printed on spine and tail edge, script running both horizontally and vertically, printed versos still closed at the fold
Qu Minmin and Jiang Qian (design), Pleasure of Learning (Zhou Xue; Phoenix Fine Arts), Leipzig Bronze Medal 2016
a felt wrap tied with raffia, stitch binding with an open spine and folded rice-paper leaves bearing calligraphy and ink painting
Zhu Yingchun and Huang Fu Shanshan, Bugs' Book (Guangxi Normal University Press), Leipzig Silver Medal 2017
five years of traces left by insects, spiders and worms on paper, read by the jury as a script
Zhou Chen (design), Ink Rubbing by Leng Bingchuan (Dolphin Books), Leipzig Honorary Appreciation 2017
a white jacket with one slit showing black, the book block black on all six sides with an open spine, the artist's name engraved into the bottom edge
Pan Yanrong (design), Tea Canon (Lu Yu and others; The Commercial Press), Leipzig Honorary Appreciation 2018
vertical text in a traditional red line grid on thin yellowish paper, finely ribbed Chinese paper for the pictures, folded leaves closed at the front and matte gold edges
Zhang Wujing (design), The Art of Gardening (Ji Cheng and Chen Zhi; China Architecture & Building Press), Leipzig Silver Medal 2018
subheads taken from old woodcut-printed scripts, zigzag and letter-fold plates, a shortened jacket over an open spine with yellow sewing thread
Zhou Chen (design), Old Trades of Jiangsu
A Glimpse (Pan Wenlong; Jiangsu Phoenix Education Publishing), Leipzig Honorary Appreciation 2019: grey-brown food-wrapping paper roughened on all sides and side-sewn with paper string

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