Meet Benson & Benson!
After years spent working in-house, designers and educators Kevin Barrett Kane and Emma Christine Hall return to independent practice with Benson & Benson, a full-service book design and production studio dedicated to high complexity and bespoke book packaging projects. They have simultaneously formalized their book design workshop and lecture series into Contemporary Book Design, an education platform devoted to the craft, history, and future of book making.
The move is something of a homecoming—before taking in-house roles at Stanford University Press, University of California Press, Callisto Media, and Penguin Random House, Kevin and Emma ran The Frontispiece, a book design studio they cofounded at 25 years old. They return to the studio model with years of experience from opposite corners of the publishing industry, and at a particularly unsettled moment as generative AI, shifting production economics, and changing ideas about how books are made challenge long-held assumptions about the designer’s role.
I spoke with them about what they learned by going in-house, why they’ve chosen to strike out on their own again, and what it means to devote a practice to the physical book right now.
1. Benson & Benson isn’t really your first studio together. You founded The Frontispiece in 2015, designed hundreds of books, and then stepped away. Why did this feel like the right moment to begin again?
Emma: The move has been a long time coming. We have always been each other’s best colleagues and preferred collaborators. Even in our in-house roles, every piece of work that leaves our desks gets the other person’s feedback beforehand.
Kevin: There was a day earlier this year where we sat down to write a speculative business plan for a new studio. It just poured out of us. We realized pretty quickly that the combination of hard lessons learned launching our first studio (as babies!) and our now combined decades of experience on opposite sides of the industry was everything we needed to build something new.
Emma: We’re always looking to grow and challenge ourselves as designers and this seemed like the next logical step for finding more challenging projects and people within the industry and without that are willing to push the envelope of what the book is and can be.
Kevin: That makes it sound like we’re imagining some kind of evolution of the book. In reality, we’ve noticed a dramatic cultural shift back towards analog and hand made craft. When we talk about pushing the envelope, that is the wave we’re riding in on. We like experimental book craft, but the majority of what we specialize in is getting back to basics and building durable physical objects that defy time and trend.
2. Does Benson & Benson feel like a continuation of The Frontispiece, or do you think of it as an entirely different company?
Emma: We’re thinking of it as an evolution. For one, we chose a name that everyone can pronounce and understand—something we missed out on the first time. What we took for granted before—that industry people would recognize the word and meaning and associate us with the craft—we’ve learned is a slippery slope of jargon for the majority of our clients.
Kevin: We didn’t recognize it at the time, but we operated The Frontispiece with a freelance mindset. We spent so much of our energy and time just grasping at project after project, without any concept of where we were headed. This time we have a very clear vision of what Benson & Benson will become. We are more than just a studio (already). Our vision is to build a community around the practice of book design that aligns to our core principles of timelessness, play, and collaboration.
3. Those intervening years gave you experience in very different corners of publishing—Kevin largely in scholarly and university-press publishing, and Emma largely in commercial and trade publishing. How have those different experiences changed the way you approach books together?
Kevin: I’ve always felt a strong connection to academia, having initially envisioned becoming a professor when I was in school. I’m a fairly dogmatic person (something that balances well with Emma’s it-dependsisms) and find a lot of kinship in scholarly spaces. When studying book design, I was always interested in those writing manuals for the practice of book design, from Tschichold to Argetsinger. So in the University Press atmosphere, I fit right in, not only with my highly-educated colleagues but also with the scholars whose works I packaged (over 2,500 of them!).
Emma: Kevin hit it on the nose identifying my fervent agnosticism around design practice and philosophy. Working in commercial and trade publishing, there is a lot of variety in the work I’m assigned. From high complexity cookbooks and workbooks to children’s board books and gift market card decks, the one constant is that the reader is an ever-moving target. I bring a heavy research practice to each and every project in order to understand who I am designing for, and what they want me to tell them about themselves through the design. I find that there is not enough dogma in the world to capture that, so curiosity is my guiding principle.
Kevin: The differences in those responses is what makes us a great collaborative team. We constantly check each other’s working modalities by offering counter perspective, which gives us true Swiss Army Knife capabilities when dealing with clients.
Emma: We also both deeply respect each other’s perspectives and acknowledge our own blind spots. We have always aspired to a working relationship that is more like the Eameses than the Vignellis. We are equals and our business, from operating agreement to our daily tea time meeting together, is a reflection of that.
Kevin: And on the hard days, it helps that we are in love. Not all collaborative duos are so lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you see it)!
4. In past interviews, you’ve outlined the concept of “holistic book design”—the idea that the cover, interior, typography, materials, and physical object should belong to one another. Is Benson & Benson, in some ways, an attempt to build a practice around that idea?
Kevin: Our entire careers have orbited around this idea. As for my various roles when in-house, I have worked tirelessly against the practice of standardized interiors for the sake of cost-cutting and automation. Beyond our foundational principles, Benson & Benson’s core belief is that every book deserves to be carefully designed. That does not mean that every book requires a massive budget and bespoke elements, but considering that books are constructed of environmental resources, expend hours of human labor and skill, and then exist taking up space in the physical world necessitates we work deliberately and intentionally.
Emma: I don’t know if I have anything to add to that.
Kevin: I could talk about this all day. When thinking about a specific detail like, say, typography, we are not of the “open the type menu and scroll until it looks good” camp. As Emma alluded to previously, we obsessively research and justify every decision that goes into our designs. That, in a nutshell, is what Holistic Book Design looks like in practice.
5. Do you want the studio itself to have a recognizable visual style?
Emma: No. I think this comes down to our subscription to Beatrice Warde’s Crystal Goblet doctrine of book design. Ultimately the book is a vessel not only for the text, but also for the reader’s imagination (yes, even in nonfiction). As book designers, what separates us from the majority of the graphic design community is the requirement that we hold high design standards for a myriad of visual styles. It’s not important for us to sell you Kevin and Emma as individual design egos. You don’t want that from your book designer. And that’s why Benson & Benson is not named Kane & Hall. It’s something external, amorphous, and (we hope) that will grow in size and number.
Kevin: It’s interesting, because we don’t just work on books. When building our own brand and working with clients in branding/identity, exhibition, wayfinding, and other spaces, we quickly shift into our personal styles, which do exist and are founded on our interests in mid-century modernism, modular architecture, art history, nature and (for me at least) 16th century proto-roman hybrid typography, to name a few. One thing that we teach in our workshops is that book design is a complex intersection of branding/identity, UI/UX, and book manufacturing that is unique amongst the other craft-oriented practices of design.
It’s not important for us to sell you Kevin and Emma as individual design egos. You don’t want that from your book designer. And that’s why Benson & Benson is not named Kane & Hall. It’s something external, amorphous, and (we hope) that will grow in size and number.
—Emma Hall
6. This seems like a great point to ask about your education platform, Contemporary Book Design. Why are you launching this in tandem with your studio?
Emma: One profound lesson from working in-house all these years has been the profound lack of print and long-form graphic design education. Not just new hires, but even seasoned book designers, lacked basic knowledge of how to build bullet-proof InDesign files that could hold up to our own internal standards. I spent many years building training modules for onboarding designers to a collective, consistent process of book design. I was confounded by the basic skills I had to teach in order to get everyone up to speed. Foundational book design skills as simple as how to automate page numbering in InDesign seemed to have slipped through the cracks of many other designer’s very expensive design educations. And that felt unfair.
Kevin: Working in much smaller design departments, I never had quite this profound of an experience with lack of education amongst colleagues, but I certainly felt that, whenever we were hiring a designer, our options for talent were limited. Over the years, aspiring book designers have often reached out to me asking for advice. What started as a list of resources on my website (all of which were books) evolved into what is now Contemporary Book Design. Before launching our first lecture series in 2020, we audited the education space (both online and in formal programs) worldwide, looking for any platforms teaching book design in the contemporary publishing landscape. What we found was that there were none remotely as thorough as what we had built. That is still true today.
Emma: We don’t believe in gatekeeping, a practice we believe has stunted the publishing industry across the board but particularly in design and production. We firmly believe that the best designers in the world should work on books and the knowledge necessary for them to deliver should be readily available. Books, after all, deserve that.
7. Contemporary Book Design begins with the history of books and eventually arrives at AI, print-on-demand, and the future of the profession. Why does someone learning book design today need to understand what bookmakers were doing hundreds of years ago?
Kevin: You’ll have to sign up for our class to get the full answer, but essentially our entire curriculum is built around the single idea that traditional practices do and should inform every decision we make as designers in this exciting new digital space. And yes, it’s still exciting and new. InDesign just turned 27 years old. The practice of book making, even if we limit ourselves to the historical definition of the “book,” is roughly 20 times older than that.
Emma: Our Fall 2026 course has already begun, but if you would like to sign up for information about the spring workshop and the self-guided workshop we are developing, you can do so here.
8. You have an upcoming lecture in New York titled Book Design in the Age of Slop. So let’s ask the obvious question: What, exactly, is “slop”?
Emma: This is a fun question. As humans (especially in 2026), our words are so charged, and “slop” is definitely a charged word. It signals carelessness, unwantedness, and filth. I compare it to the concepts of “invasive species” versus “opportunistic species” from sustainable agriculture practices.
Kevin: Emma has a higher level degree in permaculture design, by the way.
Emma: The difference between invasive and opportunistic is that one focuses on impact and the other focuses on behavior, respectively. For the sake of evaluating AI slop on a scale of millennia rather than years, I think it’s important to talk about its behavior first, because we don’t have enough data on its impact yet. And as book designers, hard as it is to break out of the echo chamber, we think in millenia not in years, because the end product of our efforts will survive that long.
The design capabilities of AI, what we’ve come to know collectively as slop, allow average people without design training to create graphics and visuals on the basis of every artist and designer that has created anything up to this point.
Kevin: There was a time when I would have limited that to “that has created anything on the internet” but we have recently learned that technology companies are peeling apart books and art from the physical world in their insatiable appetite for more AI training materials.
Emma: We can attach words to this. In one sense, we can say it democratizes design—something that has happened before with other technologies from the printing press to Microsoft Paint. In another sense, it is the theft of ideas and intellectual property—which has also happened before. So when we look to the past for what happens when design is democratized and ideas are stolen, the result is a cheapening of the associated style, which inherently increases the value and social capital of creations those tools are incapable of making. We’re already seeing this cataclysmic shift back towards the humanmade, the tactile, and analog. There are entire revolutions in art, music, and literature based on this concept. Think: the arts and crafts movement in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.
Kevin: If you’re interested in hearing more about our thoughts on this and how designers can navigate these shifting cultural ideals, come to our talk or check out the recording when it is posted over at AIGA.
9. Okay, now for some fun questions. What’s a book-design trend you’d happily never see again? What is a book design trend you would like to see again?
Kevin: As book designers, we don’t only have to think about trends in design. There are overlapping trends in writing style, market infatuation, and titling that we are required to pay attention to. I personally would love to go to Barnes & Noble and not see 20+ versions of The Girl Who ______, The Girl That ______, etc. We trace this phenomenon back to Peter Mendelsund’s 2005 cover for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was so successful in both design and book sales. That cover also helped start the design trend of interactive typography (one that I myself have leaned into over the years) that fills design sites like I Need A Book Cover with both good and bad examples of a trend done well. But yeah, the naming thing has got to stop.
Emma: Easy topical one for me. AI-generated art. It’s so obvious, even when some of the public doesn’t recognize it. It’s defined mostly by a complete lack of hierarchy and a weird glossiness that doesn’t belong on an object intended to be so timeless.
Kevin: As for a trend I’d love to see come back: designer signatures on covers. I mean, literally. Look into the archives at the old Alvin Lustig and Philip Grushkin mechanicals. Little signatures. Signing their work. Ironically, we’re one of the only industries of graphic design where we still get a written credit on the work—these days usually on the inside of the back jacket flap or on the copyright page—but I would love to see designer signatures make their way back to the front cover as a small callback to the golden days of trade fiction cover design.
Emma: I controversially would love to see a return to character depictions on covers ala old western Louise L’Amour titles and pulp fiction bodice-ripper illustrations on covers. I just love them.
10. Imagine your dream client. They come to you with no budget restrictions, no sales department, no production limitations, and no requirement that anyone actually buy it. What are you making?
Emma: Because I want this as a home chef just as much as I would love working on it, I am making a cookbook with an exhaustive art program that shows every step of the process illustrated and flashy photography of every final recipe featured full-bleed across. I also want to include lifestyle shots of me, the photographer, the food stylist, and everyone else who worked on the book devouring the food at a big party afterwards. All the bells and whistles, obviously.
Kevin: I’ve said for years that we have two dream clients, and they are very different. The first is the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. Anyone who knows anything about me knows that Still has had a profound, almost life-defining impact on my work and my person. That was true before the Still Museum was constructed and opened in 2011, but afterwards that one perfect building has become a pilgrimage for my soul. Emma and I were even married there in 2017. To work on a book project for an exhibition or retrospective of Still’s work would be a true dream—the only drawback is that I think I might have a small heart attack the day we got the project.
My second dream client is Conan O’Brien. And he knows it. I call into the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast hotline about once a quarter to remind him that the world is waiting for his biography and that I, longtime listener, 14th time caller, should be the one to design it. I am nothing if not an earnest fool.
