Type is the winner. Our notes on the Cracked guide put it in four words, and they still sum the job up. Paul Nelson’s design for the Mad Heritage Collective puts one word on a cobalt cover and lets clean letterforms carry some heavy subject matter. It is also a model of the cheap, clear exhibition guide: A5, stapled, uncoated throughout and simple enough to put in every visitor’s hand.
The booklet leads visitors round Cracked, an installation on show at Charleston in Firle, June to September 2026. The collective wrote it, and Hazel McMichael, who founded the group during a fellowship at Charleston in partnership with Curating Visibility, introduced and edited it. Together they piece together the house’s hidden histories of madness through the lives of 12 people tied to its rooms and objects. The texts draw on the Mad Movement and Mad Studies, and Virginia Woolf, Charleston’s most famous visitor, sits among them. Six ideas from it are worth lifting for any show.
Hand the cover to one word
The front is a single field of cobalt blue. Cracked runs up its edge in a pale, rounded sans serif, turned on its side like the label on a museum drawer. No photograph, no ornament. With material this weighty, a calm cover wins trust before anyone reads a line inside.
You could do the same with yours for nothing extra. A well set word costs no more to print than a picture, and it never competes with the work inside. Spend the effort on choosing the typeface and the one colour behind it.
Turn the back cover into a content note
Flip the guide and the blue continues, now holding an alphabetical list of everything the texts touch on, set ragged in pale type. It opens with ableism and closes with writing. As a graphic it fills the panel; as information it tells readers what they are about to open, which is a kind thing to do for a show about madness and its histories. If your exhibition handles difficult themes, this is a graceful way to forewarn people without a warning label.
Give each life one spread and one object
Inside, the system never wavers. A bold name and dates head the left page, followed by short paragraphs of black text on bright white paper. Opposite, an illustration by Nikki Shaill picks out a single object from the house: a floral bedspread for Vanessa Bell, round spectacles for Lytton Strachey and, for Woolf, a de-silvered dressing table mirror that “reflects the shadow of Virginia Woolf”. Henrietta Garnett and Grace Higgens appear too.
The drawings are loose washes of cobalt, teal and rose, so they pick up the cover blue and stitch the booklet together. Margins stay generous, giving each personal story time to settle. For a group show, one person and one object per spread is simple to design and simple to read standing up in a busy room.
Let print and access formats work as a pair
The opening page carries QR codes for Charleston’s free Bloomberg Connects guide and for audio description, BSL and Easy Read versions. The printed booklet doesn’t try to be everything. It points each visitor to the format that suits them, for the price of a corner of one page. Cracked was supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and that reach is part of the point.
Count in fours from the first email
Paul first asked about 30 pages. Folded and stapled booklets are built from sheets that each carry four pages, so the total has to divide by four. Harriet quoted 32 instead: a 4pp cover wrapped round 28 inside pages. One quick exchange confirmed that 32 included the cover, with Paul admitting “I confused myself with this stuff every time 😅”. Most people do. Draw your flatplan in fours on day one and you won’t be cutting pages at proof stage.
Paul was contracted through Accentuate, who raised the purchase order, while the team at Charleston helped settle numbers. When the artwork landed, we asked him to resend it as one PDF running page by page, front cover first, rather than as spreads. Our file notes for stapled booklets explain why. A PDF proof followed, and Paul’s sign off was brief: “All looks good from my end!”
Pick a light uncoated spec, and know the trade
The 28 inside pages are 120gsm uncoated: matt, glare free under gallery lights and just as happy with black text as with colour washes. The cover is 170gsm uncoated, finished in matt film to deepen the cobalt and guard it from busy fingers. Stapled, the guide stays slim and cheap enough per copy to hand to every visitor.
There is a trade, and we would rather tell you. A cover this light wants to stay open and curls a little at the edges after a couple of reads. For a guide carried round a house and garden for an afternoon, that is a fair exchange for the price. For a catalogue meant to live on a bookshelf, go up a weight or two on the cover. Our breakdown of what booklets cost to print in the UK shows how format, paper and binding move the numbers.
None of this was new ground for Paul. He first printed with us in 2012 and has brought zines, publications and flyers ever since. Soon after the guides went to Charleston, he was back asking for a price on signposting leaflets for the same installation. Planning a guide that every visitor can carry home? Start with our exhibition catalogue printing options.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100