Narrative
2011
Description
Narrative is an attempt to recreate a tale by using the format of a book itself. The story is about a little girl who wanders lost in the Covent Garden area of London. There’s fear and danger but in the end she is reunited with her mother – and safety.
Fields
Graphic Design
- NarrativeAnalysis of the book formatNarrative is an attempt to recreate a tale by using the format of a book itself. The story is about a little girl who wanders lost in the Covent Garden area of London. There’s fear and danger but in the end she is reunited with her mother – and safety.
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In 1997 The Swedish Church was faced with a separation from the State. There were many questions regarding the future, and how the new arrangement would shape the future. Would there be wafers and sacramental wine in Tetrapak, holy water in PET-bottles or a booking schedule where prices for weddings and funerals differ between churches and priests? Would there be membership cards, t-shirts with the hand of God printed on the chest – and if you’re pressed for time, the entire sermon available on CD?
The project was exhibited, among other places, at the ICA – Institute of Contemporary Art in London, in Germany at Die Neue Sammlung – Staatliches museum für Angewandte Kunst in Munich and the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Cologne.
Awarded ”ÅretsEmbryo’97” by the Swedish designers association Svensk Form. (Among the seven largest design schools and universities in Sweden, best design student work 1997. This project was on 4th place in total, and #1 within the area of graphic design).Corporate Identity Design, Branding2011 -
This is a part of my MA project from 1998 at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London. It is about finding a new editorial structure that mirrors the content of a text better than the codex book format does, or set with typefaces as they commonly look today. The project earned a distinction.
The phonetic alphabet we use in western society today was developed at the same time as the euclidean geometry, around year 600 BC. Therefore it is easy to understand why it is built up by squares, circles and straight lines.
Fractal shapes are the opposite to euclidean shapes. Their characteristics are self similarity, scale, feedback and infinity. Their dimension is something that is in between zero, one, two and three dimensions. It is not until recent years mathematicians, meteorologists and other scientists have become aware of this new geometry.
Fractal geometry is something that we are surrounded by, the world is built up by fractals. The human body is fractal, even our thoughts have a fractal structure. The only things that are not fractal are human made objects. When an idea is put on paper it should be a projection of the authors mind. The idea – the content of the text is fractal, therefore the text would be more correct visualised in a fractal way.
A letter in phonetic script represents a sound, something that probably has more to do with fractal form than euclidean form. The letter “e” for example is not a natural visualization of the sound “e”. The sign “e” is a simple two dimensional (euclidean) shape, but the sound “e” has an endless amount of nuances and dimensions.
I found that the structuralist Roman Jakobson explains the phoneme’s structure as a bunch of distinctive features. According to him, the phoneme is broken down into binary oppositions, each unit can be broken down into smaller units. Without talking about fractals he explains fractal characteristics.
I have made a 92 page book where I have looked upon different ways of visualizing fractal phonemes, here you can see some of them.
The poem on the “book” at the bottom is “Terrain” by A.R. Ammons.Graphic Design, Typography2011 -
Hybrid. (Student work, 1998)Design, Fine Arts2011 -
Together with a group of students from Sweden's major design and marketing schools and universities we initiated the competition ”48h” in 1997. www.48h.se
Design of all printed material advertising the competition. The poster is shown below.Graphic Design2011
