As always, it’s always easier for me to do things when I’m not asked. Writing is often a game for me, a pleasure, and yet this time I found it difficult. Where to start, what to tell?
It started like this…
Night falls, and in Paris, on a majestic building, large letters light up. “What is between us?” These words resound like a call from the building itself in our direction. A few words, a simple sentence, which once again takes us on a journey towards an elsewhere. What do we share? What unites us? What separates us? Prem Krishnamurthy in one of his conferences once said that “Art is a way to share. To share narratives, to share stories, to share meaning, to find a space to gather in the world with those who might be different from you.” To create a link to transmit, to transmit to create a link. What is between us? said the neon lights. I would answer: ‘stories’.
Editorial design, small printed objects all tell stories in my opinion, and you will have understood, I imagine, that’s what interests me. Historical, political, fantastic. Of content, of relationship, of form, of texture… what else? And all this for what purpose? you might ask. To create links, transmit knowledge, arouse emotions. No, not always, of course, but it’s this kind of design that interests me at the moment: a design turned towards others, which serves to better understand the world in which we evolve, to recreate a link, which seeks to transmit something.
I wanted to understand what role we could play in this transmission of knowledge, this story sharing and the importance of storytelling in printed object. To do so I met various players in the “print world”, conducted some interviews to take the loneliness also of the solo research project out.
(Very much intrigued by two different book Sarah Handelman brought us during the workshop “Building the page” I’ve managed to have a great discussion with her about books, the different roles played in their construction, the stories they tell us etc. And then, following a day of lecture I’ve been to, I also had the opportunity to meet Kristen Algera one of the editor-in-chief of Macguffin magazine)
These discussions about the importance of narration in printed works soon led to the importance of the technique and medium used to tell a story which led me to the exploration of layers of storytelling in small printed object. Indeed, design is both a question of surface and depth. What do we read between the lines? A book (or any other small printed object) laid out by a designer is not only about the content it presents: it is about layers. If you pay attention to the details of a book you hold in your hands, you may realise that the designer who created it, has linked together a whole set of elements that are not only ornamental but also have a story. The ornament as such (the iconography, the typography) has a story and then the way in which this ornament is played with also tells a story. That is to say, there is obviously the story told by the text you are reading, but there are also many other stories that make each book unique in its way of telling a story. Our work is therefore about understanding which audience we want to address and the angle through which we want to tackle our subject.