“Regnum defendo…” Book

It’s crazy how behind we are with sharing our current (and less-than-current) projects. We have some of them photographed, some even edited, and tons waiting to be photographed (anybody wants to intern with that? It’s super boring so probably not). But. This book absolutely needs to be shared because it’s one of our favorite projects from the last year. It is titled Regnum defendo ense et alis tego stricto and it is a second book in a series, after Sapientia aedificavit sibi domum that we designed before (you can see it here). It accompanied the second in a series of exhibitions on the history of the Malbork Castle – this one showing the history after the Teutonic Knights, when Malbork became a part of the kingdom of Poland.

The design of the book is at its core based on Sapientia… but the color scheme, elements of the typography and layout were updated to match the second exhibition. The strong typographic arrangements are inspired by books from the period and appear not only on the cover but also on the title pages and in the introductions of all the articles. The title on the cover is debossed in golden foil. The half dust-jacket with a crest – from a document whose motto was used to title the exhibition – unfolds to a double-sided poster. This books is less minimalistic than the first one (or, appropriately, more “baroque”) and as such was a different kind of challenge and fun to work on.

You can find a few more images on our website.

From the City Hall to the Museum: Book Design

Last year the Museum of Gdańsk was celebrating its 50th anniversary. We had the honor and pleasure of being graphically involved in these celebrations. We designed the logo of the anniversary and a book on the history of the institution. Covid restrictions meant that the celebrations were humbler than originally planned but the book makes it possible to prolong them with some solid history reading.

The logo of the anniversary uses the cross pattern from the regular logo, but interwoven with diamonds.

The book is titled “From the City Hall to the Museum”, which references the fact that one of the buildings belonging to the Museum is an old city hall of Gdańsk. Through five essays the book tells the story of the then-young Museum of Gdańsk: how it was established among the political upheaval of the 1950s Poland, how the buildings were slowly reconstructed after the war’s destruction and how the young institution was involved with the life of the city’s inhabitants. It’s quite fascinating for any history lover.

The logo for the Museum’s anniversary inspired the design. We used the diamond pattern and gold paint throughout the book. We drew another inspiration from old newspapers which constituted an important source material for the book’s authors. We used a golden diamond raster on some of the photographs to recall the raster of old newspapers and chose typographic solutions that also bring them to mind. Red color and thick frames also appear in the design for that reason.

In addition to the golden color of the frame, the cover has embossed diamond pattern. The cool photo shows workers installing a reconstructed sculpture of the king.

A title page of the first article, about the life in Gdańsk in 1960s.

Additionally, some of the pages fold out to highlight the most interesting photos, with a detail of the same photo printed in the golden raster on the cover of the folded page.

We again congratulate the Museum on the occasion and wish it 500 years more!

Cities as Military Barracks Book

The book Miasta skoszarowane (Cities as Military Barracks) by Jan Daniluk was published by the Museum of Gdańsk. This doctoral thesis describes the life in the cities of Gdańsk and Sopot during the Second World War when the German army stationed there and how this affected people’s life. A large part of the book focuses on the daily life under those difficult circumstances.

Because of the subject matter we chose a strong visual language with some disconcerting elements. Everything is printed in black and vivid red, some elements are framed with thick broken frames symbolizing the oppresion of the period and many typographic elements are broken. We are grateful to the author (and quite impressed by him!) for his openness and trust in our ideas which led to an unusual historic book (and, of course, to the publisher for agreeing to all of this).

The cover with an archival photo. The broken frame is printed with black foil.

The beginning of chapter three: a title spread and first pages.

Sneak Peek from the Printing House

One of our latest works, not yet in our hands, is a post-exhibition catalog (always a favorite kind of job) Fête Funèbre. Last week we were approving dust jacket printouts in the printing house and so today we can share teaser photos of the extremely cool hotstamping that they have. We will show you the rest of the catalog – including, well, its interior – once we get our copies but that may be a while yet.

Also, did you know that visiting a printing house can be sort of exciting (if not done too often when it becomes a bother)?

Walden, or Design in the Woods

Before we get into it, it’s another week of free shipping on Society6 if you follow this link. Enjoy.

And so we have reached the final cover in the Words Matter series. We left this one for the very end because it went through many phases and we wanted to show you a bit of the process that led to the creation of the final version. So, get ready for quite a photo essay this time.

As we have already explained with a few previous projects, we love making use of the fact that we live close by woods and using this in our designs. We’d also had a positive experience with branch typography before and so we wanted to repeat this when working on the cover for Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s classic about leaving society and living independently in a remote, woodsy location. Branches seemed like a perfect material for this theme and so one day we went out and picked enough to arrange the typography.

Walden 1.0 seemed like it would be a simple and straightforward idea, repeating our previous design: we arranged the name as a huge composition in our mostly unused room with the help of tape, blu tack and some Ikea furniture. It looked messy but it worked the way we’d planned.

It was spring then so the leaves were fairly fresh and small. In the end we shot the whole name and the photos turned out nice, clean and sufficiently legible. But during editing we realized that it will simply not work because we arranged the letters so horizontally. The cover would have small lettering and a lot of unnecessary background above and/or below it. We realized we would need to re-shoot the whole thing, arranging the letters differently.

By the time we returned to this idea, leaves got much bigger. We also began to think that arranging the letters vertically in several lines one above the other might be a tad difficult. So, another idea was born.

Walden 2.0 didn’t work out in the end either but I still think it was a good theory. This time we decided to arrange a flat composition where the letters would have a leafy border around. Not only should it (in theory) look very good but also refer to similar nineteenth century compositions and so make a nice period reference. What didn’t work this time was simply our lack of skills and/or patience.

We once read Marian Bantjes’ story of a plant poster: how she started from arranging the actual plants and gave it up because it looked like “a pile of shit” (true quote, I pulled out Pretty Pictures – which I adore – to confirm it) so she ended up working with computer scans. We only realized the truth of this story once we started arranging the border.

It looked nothing like we imagined, just a mess of things. Again, we still believe this could be done but it would need some florist experience (and probably a different background color) – the border would require much more patience, attention and, most of all, flower-arranging skills than we could spare. Also, somewhere by that time we realized there was not enough woods for us in this image and we finally hit on the semi-final idea for this cover: the lettering needed to happen in the woods, not in our apartment!

Walden 3.0. We did not dare to arrange the letters literally in the woods. We could simply see the moment when everything is almost ready and a cheerful puppy walked by an oblivious owner runs straight into the middle of the composition. Instead we decided to make the lettering portable with the help of a cardboard frame.

We built the frame from an Amazon box with a construction of wire to attach letters to. We fixed the letters with silver tape, blu tack, paper tape and simply everything that would make it more sturdy. It was not a pretty job – but in the end we loved the messiness of it. Even though we originally wanted to remove the scaffolding digitally, it made it to the final cover because they made the whole thing look so much more real and unusual. They also added the symbolic meaning of human influence on the natural world.

Still unsure of whether the shooting in the woods will pan out, we took some backup inside photos and they turned out alright. This is a completely unretouched version of one of them but it has potential to become a decent cover.

However, by then we were intent on trying out the idea of using the actual woods as background and so we went out again to create Walden 3.1, which was to become the final version of the cover. Of course, this session couldn’t have been too simple either. Once we got to the right spot, we realized we forgot the camera card. Classic us. (Also, it was alternatively very hot and rainy.) Then, we needed to decide where to place the frame so that there would be good contrast between lettering and the background. It took many, many attempts and a few moments of utter discouragement.

But finally we took a few photos that we could use. This was obviously not the end of the story (long as it already must seem to you). In fact, Walden was by far the most complicated and time-consuming cover when it came to retouching it. Even the back cover, which is twigs on the ground, took forever, because it’s actually composed from a couple of different photos. But we really enjoyed working on this cover, despite all the small frustrations on the way, and it’s too bad one can’t combine designing with outdoorsy activities more often.

Oh, as a side note: when we brought our pile of… well, plants to the house to arrange the border this fellow traveled along:

It was too lovely a coincidence to ignore so we did place him on the cover (even though as far as we know, nobody noticed yet).

The Crumbling of the Roman Empire

One of our first attempts at tangible type was a poster for I, Claudius, where we used the idea of Roman letters shattered into pieces. However, back then we used paper for only a metaphorical illustration of the broken monuments/memories/etc. When revisiting this idea for the Words Matter cover of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – a classic historical study on why the Roman Empire weakened and fell – we wanted to try a more challenging approach: we wanted to use material that would be a more direct illustration of crumbling stone.

Of course, using actual stone might be cool but there were two problems with that. One, it would have to be machine-cut and the project was about manual creation of typography. Two, we probably couldn’t really afford it. However, we found an alternative which proved so, so much fun to work with: clay.

Back in art school we had some experience with clay during a sculpting class. It was a most discouraging experience and the worst part wasn’t even the rumor that the clay we had to use had worms in it (could it really? I don’t know). So we were at best wary of working with clay again but it turned out the kind they sell in arts supply store is very clean and very easy to work with.

Once we had the letters ready, we dried them and arranged into the whole composition as designed before. We chose an orange background to loosely evoke ancient art and for its associations with burning but also for the energy it added to the design.

Finally, another fun part came. We had to break the letters into smaller pieces. Luckily, they were brittle enough (not something you could expect from actual stone) and you had to simply tap them here and there.

This is another cover based on a simple idea and quite minimalistic means so, as you can probably guess, we really like it. It’s always satisfying when the simple solutions pan out and the message comes across easily. Of course, we enjoy a convoluted, poetic solution every now and then but directness often makes for good communication.

Le deuxième coussin

Some of the previous tangible type projects we worked on before Words Matter, were actually meant as sketches for this large project. And so the idea of pin typography on a cushion appeared already on this blog, as you might or might not remember. While then it was only a formal experiment, this time we wanted the elements of the composition to relate meaningfully to the work they illustrate, namely The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir – another classic of feminist thought.

While approaching femininity in The Feminine Mystique (here) we focused more on its meaning as defined by a social role. For this cover, we focused more on the physical and sexual aspect of the problem. We wanted to evoke the atmosphere of an elegant bedroom, with the subtle, fleshy color of the pillow and the smooth material underneath it.

The lettering is a feminine script, shaped into a triangle to suggest, together with the pillow’s color, a woman’s body. However, the lettering is not embroidered: it is formed of black-headed pins. This brings additional meanings of pain and discomfort to illustrate the difficulties of the definition of femininity.

Of course, it took a while (and a whole lot of pins we bought for the occasion) to create the whole lettering composition.

But I think shooting it was more difficult than arranging the pins.

At any rate, we enjoyed working on this project. We felt it included making some less obvious decisions along the way: some alternative solutions we could’ve chosen would have probably subtly changed the meaning and these things are always interesting to explore.

Mind Over Ashes

As Words Matter includes various classics of thought, we knew from the beginning Freud will probably be there. We wondered for a while how to approach this particular writer because while some of the books we dealt with are relatively lesser known, Freud’s writings have become a part of everyday culture. And so in the end we decided to go with that and rely on the simplest, probably even primitive for some, association of Freud and a cigar. Cigar typography didn’t sound too exciting so instead we decided to create ash typography. In this decision we proudly followed in the footsteps of some brilliant designers who had already experimented with powdery substances, such as Marian Bantjes and Danielle Evans.

We started by creating a stencil form to use (predicting, rightly, that ash will not be heavy enough to form letters just by pouring it, which you can do with e.g. sugar) and this was just about the only easy part of the enterprise (the photo shows, of course, a negative of the form).

But the first big problem came with cigars. We wanted this to be authentic (and we needed the cigar for the photo, too) so we bought actual cigars (the cheapest we could get, mind you) and faced the task of turning them into ashes. Now, we’re very much not smokers so just getting down with a bunch of cigars and smoking them casually was out of the question. Instead we ended up crouching in the porch with matches, a couple of igniters, lighters and candles, hoping very much not to cause a fire (we didn’t) and getting increasingly frustrated. It took us forever to figure out the best way of burning around the cigar (and not burning our fingers) and it still took another forever to get this pitiful (though pretty) amount of cigar ash.

We had about five such cigars and in the end we persevered through burning them all but I don’t think any other project ever has made me so nauseous – literally speaking, of course, because if we’re talking about figurative nausea, there were many worse designs.

It was obvious from the start that we would never get enough cigar ash for the whole design so we decided to fill the main part of it with actual furnace ash (much less smelly, but much more dirty and unpleasant to touch).

This process only created the bare bones of the design: the letters were barely legible and it took much fine-tuning of the edges to arrive at the result we wanted. Obviously, we could hardly breathe around the composition for fear of huffing and puffing it off the table, so holding our breath was additional fun (and us still dizzy from all the smoke). And then we needed to position ourselves with the camera tripod on the table, over the whole thing. You should have seen us (but not heard because by that point it was indecent with all the swearing).

As you can see, the cigar was definitely not long and impressive enough to form the final image: that took some photoshopping later.

This is actually another design we’re really happy with. It starts with an idea so simple it borders on a joke but the somber color scheme and heavy wood (plus heavy typography, evoking 19th-century letters) offset that and bring in the whole masculine, often oppressive world of Freud’s ideas. We find it quite appropriate, considering how psychoanalytic ideas have functioned in society: somewhere between a serious, somewhat depressing theory and a pop-cultural gag. And, of course, a cigar might sometimes be just a cigar but more often, when coupled with Freud’s name, it will also be a most common phallic symbol and that’s how we used it (and also, as a context for the letters to make their material clearer, and a fun place to put the logo, if we’re being very precise).