“People are always trying to figure us out,” Brendan Dugan says good--naturedly over coffee one afternoon in downtown Manhattan, up the block from Karma, the multifaceted store out of which he operates. “They say, ‘Wait, this is crazy. You design artist books, and you have a bookstore, but you also have a gallery. I don’t get it.’ ”Neither does he, really.

Dugan, 34, occupies a unique position in the art world: he’s a trained graphic designer whose crisp, idiosyncratic sensibility has earned him an A-list client roster that includes galleries like Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth, as well as art magazines and boutique art-book publishers. But he is perhaps most admired by artists, who seek him out to help with their most unusual projects.

When the neo-Pop maestro Rob Pruitt needed a new catalog, he turned to Dugan, who created special editions with different cover treatments: One came sandwiched between slabs of marble, and another featureda mirror with a rolled-up dollar bill and a razor blade taped to it. At the launch event, in Dugan’s former space in the West Village, Pruitt signed copies—in the nude, save for a strategically positioned toy panda. For Life Size, the artist Sam Falls simply handed over hundreds of his photographs and let Dugan do his thing.

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