The book of shards

O Livro dos cacos e outros fragmentos incômodos (lit. The Book of Shards and Other Bothersome Fragments), is an extensive collection of writings and pictures by the brazilian artist and author Gladstone de Menezes.

The book gathers and organizes the work he published on his personal blog for some years. Among them, there is prose poetry, 120 poems written in the gerund verb forms, a visual diary compiling a leap year's worth of photos taken and a small dictionary of unusual words he uses in his work.

His writings are mostly poignant and they take different voices at times. This led me and my partner in this design project to literally "break" the book into smaller books (as suggested by the title), which would be presented inside a cardboard box.

The design approach is modular and strongly minimalistic, rid of any unnecessary or decorative elements per the brief taken. This way, we let his exasperating writing take the lead. To represent the different voices he adopts, we chose a type family that would be able to handle smoothly their tones within the text compositions without breaking the same structure across the book tomes.

The design takes a slightly more expressive approach on the box we created and screenprinted with a partner of the studio. It's subtle yet it plays off of the theme suggested by its name.

This work was designed in partnership with Gabriel Menezes.