010 Publishers have been producing the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture’s yearbook since 2002. For this sixth volume they went for a different designer and a new format. The book’s unique identity is created by colour and material: on the brown board of the cover the brilliant blue of the interior turns into a restrained bluish green.

A yearbook is made up of a number of more or less obligatory items, in this case the course programmes, final year projects, workshops, activities and other useful and/or interesting facts about the Academy. One additional problem is that the material is supplied by several different sources. The designers here have clearly taken upon themselves the task of ranking and arranging all this disparate material, and they have turned it all into a strong whole.

At the same time, their approach has been anything but restrained. Although one might form the impression that there
is a great deal of printing in black with blue spot colour, in point of fact quite a lot is illustrated in colour, where necessary. The student project section is interleaved with thinner half-width leaves. Printed in blue and black they are a good way of placing the bilingual factual data of each project alongside the project descriptions without having to sacrifice space to them on the spread itself. The section of 23 final year projects gives each one its own foldout. They create space for the illustrations, and the consistently blue pages on their versos are a further contribution to the unhurried atmosphere.

Because all the resources are used differently in each section, you only gradually realize how the book fits together: complex and solid at once.