Fourteen Books to Love for February 14th

Here at re:design we heart many things – LEGO blocks, huskies, bacon, The Good Wife, Christmas Eve and I could really go on – but books are definitely in our top three. And now that Valentine’s Day is upon us again we profess our love for literature with a series of (literally) heart-centered covers.

Heart is a fun shape to work with and surprisingly versatile. Each cover uses the shape as the center of the composition around which a symbolic illustration and typography are arranged. The books range from pulp romances through venerable classics to postmodernist experiments but all feature some version of the eternal love theme.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, an ambitious and rather pervy, if read literally, take on love.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, a decidedly unambitious take.

The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler (a more physiological interpretation of the theme).

Fatalistic view of love and life in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo.

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz.

In Search of Lost Time or in love with the past, by Marcel Proust.

Cider House Rules by John Irving.

Ireland by Frank Delaney.

A Good Year by Peter Mayle.

Homer’s Daughter by Robert Graves.

Nana by Emile Zola, a socially critical anti-love story.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Another classic, The Gambler by Dostoyevsky.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, love in Japan.

Title page for Lolita, with the logo for the series.

Series of spines. For typography we chose a combination of Scala and Stag. We picked a limited color palette of reds and grays with some greens and yellows.

The logo of the series, consisting – predictably – of 14 hearts.

And we wish all of you a happy Valentine’s Day (either spent with your beloved person or with your beloved book).

Garden of Graphic Delights

Today we have finally gotten down to cleaning up all the post-Christmas decorations (which we know is late-ish but we just love having Christmas lights around) and decided to do some creative recycling of the dried up holly leaves littering our room because we found them quite pretty and intriguing. What precisely we decided to do is another typographic poster to include in the Theatre of Literature series.

Unlike with the previous posters, we didn’t have a selected novel title to use and couldn’t think of one so we actually resorted to Google once we came up with the ideas that this book should include. We wanted something about old age and nature, nostalgic and on the serious side, and found a seemingly perfect match. In Her Garden by Jon Godden is a 1981 novel about an elderly widow who falls in love with her young gardener and dies under suspicious circumstances, a cross between a psychological and a gothic story – at least according to the Internet sources as we’ve yet to read it. (Again, this is not how we normally work but since the perishable material was ready, we seized the opportunity.)

We built simple, cursive-like letters from the leaves so that the leaves’ curves reinforce those of the letters. We used the rest of the leaves to make an ornament, the kind whose structure can be found on a wallpaper in an old house. We picked a somber color that does not contrast strongly with the design to create a rather melancholy atmosphere.

With the Christmas decorations gone, at least we have the satisfaction of having turned a part of the chore into more enjoyable work.

The Magus Poster

With this poster we returned to working with paper. The Magus by renown John Fowles tells a mutlilayered story that we don’t feel competent to describe in detail. So be content with this: a guy visits a Greek island where an older man tries to manipulate him in a sort of experiment, while two twins try to seduce him. Yes, we realize it’s a simplification, just read the book.

In the poster we focused on the magus  who with his God-complex tries to influence and direct other people’s lives. Letters become puppets with the invisible puppeteer holding the strings off-frame. Lighting gives it a very theater-like atmosphere, the motif of theater and acting prominent in the book. It also creates natural shadows and the double letters remind of the twins in the novel, among other things.

For letters we chose Priori by Emigre, for its twist on classic serif letters and its somewhat occult flavor. For Greek atmosphere we picked white on blue, the blue dark enough to add some nocturnal element.

We first cut out the papers letters and fixed them with white threads. Then, the more complicated part came in which we had to fix the letters to a horizontal plane (made of cardboard) above, so that they hung loose and stayed legible. Finally, all we had to do was experiment with lighting until the shadows looked right. All in all, this proved more complicated than cutting carrots.

The behind-the-scenes part didn’t look too elegant, admittedly:

But it’s always satisfactory to overcome the obstacles that come from physical design work. It’s a different feeling to the purely conceptual obstacles you encounter when working solely on the computer.

He Called Me Carrots

Truth be told, today’s poster started a long time ago as a concept entitled “It would be fun to make letters of carrots.” Carrot letters remained on our minds – not constantly, though – until we found a way to incorporate them into the Theatre of Literature series in a perhaps somewhat abstract but not completely random way: to illustrate Anne of Green Gables.

Probably nobody needs this classic story described. We focused on the one most characteristic feature of beloved Anne, her orange-red hair that earned her Carrots nickname from teasing but oh-so-charming Gilbert.

More indirectly we found carrots a good match because they bring to mind a certain simplicity of rustic life that is present in L. M. Montgomery novels. We made letters out of carrot slices, having bought a particularly big  specimen for the purpose. We contrasted orange letters with the green background because of the strong contrast but also because of the greenery of Montgomery’s countryside setting. (Also, this way form and meaning go hand in hand, as we prefer them to do.)

We didn’t design the letters ahead, just experimented while carving into the slices. A carrot proved, as we hoped, a very graceful material, submitting easily to our ideas.

And because we enjoyed working with carrots so much, we did not stop with one poster but designed a whole Carrot Alphabet for future use and reference and for the challenge the other letters presented. Of course, it’s possible to do some of the letters differently but in general we’re pleased with them.

Design Patchwork

Alias Grace is one of wonderful novels by a Canadian author Margaret Atwood. It tells a story of a servant convicted of murder. It’s one of those Victorian-obsessed novels, like The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Crimson Petal and the White, and it’s up there with the best of ‘em story-wise while Atwood is arguably a better writer. All I’m saying is, read it.

Quilt is a dominating motif of the novel, both as a part of the story and a composition principle and I always regretted no cover author (to my knowledge) used it but hey, at least we could in our new poster. With my mom’s extensive collection of patterned fabrics we built the quilt-like composition out of almost 150 pieces.

A part of an interesting challenge of this poster was to design letters built of rectangular triangles and then separate them from the background of other triangles and squares. As quilt rookies we researched quilt making on the web and had our misconception corrected: initially we planned to separate the letter elements by color (like red) but it turned out pro quilters use difference in lightness. So that’s what we did, with light colors forming the title and dark, mostly navy blue and brown with red thrown here and there as a reminder of the murder, making up the background.

Originally we planned to sew the pieces together and we might still do that but for now arranging them properly turned out challenging enough.

We loved how this project let us focus on our design interests – such as grid-based letters, color, topic-form relation – but also broaden our comfort zone a little with new materials. We could have done it with paper and I daresay it’d still work but fabric pieces are so much better.

I, Robotic Poster

As promised, we continue the series of literary and typographic posters. Today’s work reaches beyond paper as it let us experiment with different materials, inspired by a different subject matter. We tackled the classic stories of Isaac Asimov dealing with robots and robotics. Instead of choosing one (though if we had, it would’ve been The Caves of Steel), we decided to treat them jointly as a sort of anthology. We suppose this way, with the author’s name, the stories are easier to identify.

Isaac Asimov might well be our favorite science-fiction writer because we appreciate his lucidity and the fact that he usually managed to avoid the opaque philosophical passages other sf writers use to give their work appearances of profundity. In other words, he’s fun to read. Many of his stories and a few novels deal with the introduction of robots into human society. Asimov invented the famous (at least geek-famous and Will Smith-fans-famous) laws of robotics which determined what robots could and couldn’t do and then spent his time inventing ways for robots to overcome them. Writers.

Asimov is tricky in that he wrote about the future but his is already a classic and somewhat retro science-fiction vision so we were looking for a visual futuristic language that would include a nod to the past and again, materials proved to be an answer. We used aluminum foil which is soft and easily molded into shapes, and pressed it onto a form composed of old letterpress type, creating an imprint of the text. The silver foil stands for metals that robots are built of but the letters introduce a more human (and intentionally somewhat messy) aspect, present in Asimov’s writing. It’s the combination of the two that he found interesting.

As you might realize then we had only to flip the photo to get a legible, non-mirror version and, of course, post-process it to some extent.

But we usually look for something extra than just the letters to make the posters more fun, a sort of illustration without illustration. This time we went all-out and actually built a moveable type robot, which looked like this:

This is the lower layer of the poster, you could say, and we really enjoyed assembling it (no, it doesn’t do anything though).

Both layers of the robot’s head:

I, Poster

Today we continue our series of typographic theatrical posters, which we began the last week with The Three Musketeers. Today’s project, I, Claudius, illustrates the famous novel by Robert Graves, a pseudo-autobiography by the Roman emperor Claudius (better known to his friends and relatives as Claudius the Idiot, or That Fool Claudius, or Claudius the Stammerer). A great story, adapted for TV by BBC, would make a fine play.

Actually, the whole Theatre of Literature project’s roots lie in this poster, which evolved from a different design that it was first a part of. We thought it would make a good poster and only then did we decide to continue doing posters based on famous novels’ titles.

The title is arranged from paper letters cut out and then cut into pieces so that they resemble a broken stone or mosaic. This brings to mind the passing of time which makes stone crumble but also Claudius’ stammering and, more generally, the fragmentation of any historical account (also, I studied literature before turning to design).

The typography is based on Requiem by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, a great alternative for overused Trajan. Although inspired by work of a sixteenth-century Renaissance calligrapher, it clearly descends from Roman capitals and retains their monumentality and classic elegance.

The red color of the background is the kingly red but also the color of blood.

Theatre of Literature will continue with more posters next week(s) so, stay tuned.

Words Cut Deeper Than Swords

Recently we reread The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas and found out a couple of useful things, such as: it’s honorable to hang your wife if she didn’t disclose all her tattoos before wedding and as long as you’re born noble innkeepers have no right to ask you for money for their services. And then we decided the book coincided well with our current typographic experiment: creating letters by cutting into a sheet of paper with a knife, which resulted in today’s poster.

We used blue paper with golden fleur-de-lis ornament to symbolize the French monarchy and red color underneath, which stands both for blood and the Cardinal lurking behind. The cutting obviously alludes to sword-fighting.

The poster is a part of our ongoing series, which we had no chance to present so far, called Theatre of Literature. For each poster we pick one great novel and design a theater-like poster. Each design consists of the novel’s title presented typographically and in a specific material (so away from the computer and so far mostly in paper). This is our current pet project as it actually combines our love of design, literature and letters. More posters coming soon.

Close-ups of the poster (it’s entirely hand-made, even the ornament, as witnessed by the imperfections).

And this is the logo of the series, in our favorite Didot.

As mentioned in the beginning a typographic experiment came before the poster. We tried to present each letter of the alphabet as a cut in a sheet of paper, where the 3-dimensionality plays part in the legibility. Below is the rough first attempt at what we intend to become the Slasher Alphabet.

Close-ups of single letters.