Friday 24 March 2017

The icon drives up a one way street



The right-hand page has one long paragraph.



No color correction to even up the quality of the photos.

Just how bad can a photo be before someone says we can't use this...middle photo on the right-hand page




This page layout is repeated again and again and again.



Nearly all the pages have grey bland looking mono photos.

A rather tacky looking and amateurishly produced book about America's finest bus. The basis of the contents are dozens and dozens of amateur snaps, in color but mainly black and white, of the Scenicruiser run by Greyhound and in later years when it was operated by other companies or individuals. The two authors know their technical history of the bus but they aren't writers and it shows, paragraphs are hundred of words long and Iconografix don't seem to use editors or designers to turn the words and photos into a professionally produced book.

The upright format isn't the best way to display most of the photos which are landscape (Iconografix other bus archive titles are landscape) and there are pages of them mostly with the same layout and almost all exteriors ones. Where are the interior shots? A worthwhile chapter would have been a portfolio of photos showing every aspect of the inside (including the engine) the publisher's should have send a snapper to the Greyhound Museum in Hibbing to photograph inside their Scenicruiser.

None of the color photos show any signs of process work to even up the quality and black and whites come out as a bland grey with no real blacks in them. Overall the book looks no more than a huge collection of very similar photos just tipped into the pages with no real editorial judgement at all. PD-4501 deserves better than this.

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