EPHEMERA — CalArts

A collaboration with Colomba Cruz. Book and cover art direction and design for California Institute of the Arts MFA writing program. The cover was hand screen printed and the interior pages were printed on a risograph.

The texts in Ephemera are unconventional and experimental. For the design, we referenced old books, but then through typesetting and illustrations we made everything feel a little off, uncanny even. As if a phantom had wandered through the pages moving things askew; Margins are slightly uneven, ellipses fall down the page, and shadows creep in through the gutter. We worked off of these themes of hauntedness and memory, interpreting them through details and little repetitions (literary glitches) that infiltrate so many of the works. We created a system so that occasionally the ends of paragraphs would awkwardly hang over the edge of the margin. Glancing over the page, your eye catches them (the tail-ends of thoughts that stick in your mind) and reads them like a ghost narrative.

The illustrations of nothingness, have no concrete meaning, they depict only relationship and emotion, itis through their association with the text that new meaning is found.