It has been a while, but it is good to be printing for Rave again. This is Rave Frame IV, the 2026 degree show catalogue for Illustration for Communication at Ravensbourne University London, and we will say it plainly: this might be the best degree show catalogue of the year. A4, perfect bound, 104 pages on soft uncoated stock, and a concept we have genuinely never seen done before.
The theme is Past Lives. In their final year, each illustrator on the course was randomly allocated a year between 1951 and 1999, then sent off to research it and respond. Scientific discoveries, cultural and sporting events, shifting fashions, family stories. The catalogue then runs in chronological order, starting in the fifties and working forwards, which turns 47 separate portfolios into something closer to a visual history of the second half of the century. We look at a lot of degree show catalogues. That idea is the best structural solution to the group-show problem we have come across: it gives every graduate an equal, self-contained brief, and it gives the reader a reason to turn the page that has nothing to do with alphabetical order.
Open the cover, one page of context, then straight into powerful full-bleed illustrative double-page spreads. No contents list to wade through, no run of headshots first. It is quite disarming as a reader. You do not know where to look, so you just have to embrace it. And every spread is different. A mid-century travel poster for Palm Springs, complete with UFO. A watercolour comic strip about the first woman to race in a World Championship Grand Prix. Dense black crosshatching of a band on stage, dropped onto flat yellow. A brush-ink astronaut facing a page of solid near-black. An isometric eighties street scene in orange and lilac. Such a wide range of styles in one book, and the chronological running order is the only thing holding it together. It should not work as well as it does. A4 can feel too big for a catalogue. Here it does the opposite: it accentuates the work and lets each piece be more powerful simply by being larger. When an illustration is the entire reason the book exists, give it the room.
Our first quote had the inside pages on 170gsm uncoated, and we said in the same breath that we would drop it. On a 104-page A4 book, 170gsm makes for a stiff, heavy object where every page turn is a small effort. So we recommended 120gsm instead: easier to turn, and cheaper to print. Both, in the same suggestion. That took the spine from 11mm down to 8mm. It was the right call, and you can feel it. The soft uncoated inside pages are lovely to turn, which matters enormously in a book you are meant to flick through rather than study. Uncoated also suits illustration in a way it does not always suit photography: there is no glare fighting the line work, and flat colour sits down into the sheet instead of shining back at you. The heavy coverage is where a lighter uncoated sheet gets tested, and it holds. There are spreads here that are almost entirely solid black, and pages of dense crosshatched ink, and they have come through even and rich with no show-through onto the next page. If you are weighing stocks for an illustration-led book, our showcase of silk, gloss, uncoated and recycled finishes is a useful comparison, or order some free printed paper samples. The cover is 300gsm uncoated with matt lamination to the outer, printed in a single pink across a pale peach sheet with the illustration filling almost the whole page. Matt lam on uncoated keeps the papery feel while stopping a pale cover from picking up every mark at a busy private view.
David, who lectures on the course, got in touch and had a quote back the same day, on a Friday, which seemed to surprise him. From there it was a series of practical decisions rather than a long negotiation: drop the paper weight, confirm the spine, lock the extent at 104 pages. Two pieces of advice mattered more than the rest. First, the hinge. On a perfect bound book roughly 7mm of the inside front cover and the first text page disappears into the cover hinge, and the same at the back, so any content wants to sit at least 12mm clear on that edge to have room to breathe. We sent photographs showing exactly where it lands. Second, at proof stage David spotted a few millimetres of one page mirrored onto the edge of its neighbour on several spreads and asked, sensibly, whether that was standard or an error. It is standard: it is simply how InDesign adds bleed to adjacent pages, it sits outside the trim line, and it does not appear on the finished book. Our perfect binding set-up guide and cover file guide cover both points. Then the university side of things, which is its own discipline. Payment ran through a purchase order with thirty-day terms that were not going to move, and the degree show private view was not going to move either. We asked for a PO number to attach to the invoice and got the books on press ahead of the payment clearing, because the alternative was a show with no catalogue. A bank holiday sat in the middle of the schedule and we pushed the delivery to the end of that week anyway. The artwork, incidentally, arrived as a single 3.2GB file. That is what 104 pages of full-bleed illustration looks like, and it is entirely normal for this kind of book. We moved it into pre-press and came back with a proof.
By recommending the cheaper option, which also happened to be the better one. By explaining the hinge before the artwork was finished rather than after. By answering the proof question properly instead of just saying "that's fine". And by working around university procurement so that a fixed show date stayed fixed. We have been printing end of year catalogues for art and design courses for fifteen years, and the useful things are rarely glamorous. Planning yours? Try our instant printing quote calculator, tell us your budget and we will work backwards to a size and page count that fits, or browse degree show catalogue printing and get inspired for previous year groups.
