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Paperback books

University thesis

InDesign, Photoshop
silkscreen (thermal ink)
paper | 30% cotton

My thesis questions the relationship between readers and designers. I researched how a designer can create an experience beyond just typestting and book cover creation. Each book was choosen to explore a specific theme: La Casa de los Espiritus - culture; Tlon, Uqbar and Orbus Tertius - language; To Kill a Mockingbird - youth and assigned reading; The Satanic Verses - censorship; Those Barren Leaves - typography and typestting. All books were handbound.

Book 1

La Casa
de los
Espiritus

Isabel Allende

We read culturally. I come from a Latin American heritage. I choose to read stories that have a deeper cultural connection to me. La Casa de los Espíritus is a generational story about a Latin American family. I attached my background, created by screenprinting pictures of my mother and grandparents in colour-changing thermal ink, which transformed them into my generational ghosts, making them a device of magical realism—ghosts that can be seen.

Can a genre be explained visually?
How much of ourselves is represented or taken when we read a story?

Book 2

Tlön,
Uqbar,
Orbis
Tertius

Jorge Luis Borges

Language and readership.

I integrated my research and experimented with the languages I speak. The white pages are in the original language (Spanish), the grey pages are in English, and the off-white pages are in French. Within the pages are small replicas of the Encyclopedia Britannica, often mentioned in the story and a reference I used to understand the topics or names Borges mentioned in the plot.

Can the use of visual devices immerse the reader?
How accurate is translated text?
Can we gain more by comparing languages to better understand what we are reading?

Book 3

To Kill a
Mockingbird

Harper Lee

How relevant are the books we read in school? To showcase the relevance of these stories today, I integrated excerpts from contemporary books by authors who depict their experience living in American society.

Can we add more to a book’s context outside of the book's original time?
Can a student gain more by understanding why we read certain books in school?

Red excerpts are perforated and detachable.

Book 4

Those
Barren Leaves

Aldous Huxley

How does typography change our reading experience? The story’s characters believe themselves to be better than most because of their knowledge of classical theory. This cultural satire shows them for what they truly are—small and insignificant. The more you read, the larger the margins become, revealing the insignificance of the characters.

When the characters quote classicism, the text is typeset in blackletter.

Book 5

The
Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie

A book that has been banned and burned in public. To demonstrate to the reader the context of the book’s history outside of the story, I screen-blocked in black thermal ink the sections of the book that were deemed offensive. The text can only be revealed by warming the ink with your hands. The edge of each new chapter is burned. A slow progression that grows to consume the page at each chapter’s start, alluding to the public burning of the book.

Do books hold power?

process book

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