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.