Fire 8 poetry book
Project: The Fire poetry book series was commissioned by my alumni at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). It was a series of poetry books produced by the literature department and written by the student body. Each year a collection of selected poems are compiled into the Fire series poetry books. As part of the ongoing Fire poetry series, I and a fellow design partnered up to design book 8. One of the objectives of this project was to design a book that would capture the essence and the voice of the authors. Another main objective was to tie in the number 8 in the concept of the book as this was the 8th edition in the series. The book also needed to be designed and produced affordably on a budget and meet the needs of the publishing timeline.
My role in this project
Below are the roles and responsibilities that I played a part of during the duration of this project:
Design Execution
I helped with the page layout of this poetry book while working collaboratively with a fellow colleague and lead art director, Angelo Alcasabas.
Pre-Print Production
I was responsible for packing assets and creative files for print production.
The solution:
Allowing nature to be your inspiration
The way I went about ideating a solution for the Fire 8 poetry book was to first start off with researching the number 8 and all of its historical meaning. I wanted to understand the meaning of this numerical character and how I could use its symbolism. During the research phase, the idea of the figure 8 and how it represents cycle or re-cycle started to emerge. This is something that is also found in nature. Like many living things, a growing tree would increase in size through each yearly and seasonal cycle. This idea gave life to the book and the design direction. As the saying goes, nature shall give and nature shall take.
In this instance, nature gave us the design for the cover and the book. Each ring represents a year, and in the process, the circular rings can change in size and pattern. One ring could show a past period of drought or increased and rainfall, another could show the occurrence of a fire. The rings, therefore, reflect life as much as the figure 8 represents an endless cycle. It is nature's art and poetry.
The following work below is a brief example of what was created for this project and my thought process for it.
Cover design
In order to further communicate the design direction of Fire 8, I worked with the print production vendor to create an embossed template that would allow for the first 8 rings of the tree to be raised. By doing so, it enhanced the concept of the rings of the tree and the figure 8. This was also carried throughout the pages of the book.
