A graduation project turned into hardcover book
This was my degree-completion assignment, back in 2007, the last year of my Graphic Design course at UEMG. I chose to build an illustrated storybook from the ground up - cover, logo, layout, illustration, everything, except for the writing, of course. I picked up Alice in Wonderland as the story, mainly due to a vague admiration I felt for the characters and the mood of this tale. But mind you, I hadn't actually read the original text up to that point. Little did I know there's way more than just characters and mood to it! As it turns out I was unaware (as almost everyone is, nowadays) of the huge amount of hidden puns, jokes and meanings weaved into that story, mostly because they only made sense in English. And still, many more only made sense back in the Victorian days. Those puns made the whole project infinitely more interesting to me, and became the core of the whole aesthetics.
BEHIND ALICE
A little research on Alice in Wonderland is certain to drag you down the deepest of rabbit holes, as I can testify. I found out the character of Alice was based off of a real girl - Alice Liddell, a child who was a dear friend of the author's. So much so, he wrote her the book as a birthday gift. It was initially called "Alice's Adventures Underground", and you can find images of its manuscripts online. I based the aesthetics of some of my pages and drop caps upon his manuscript. There are also many photographs of the actual Alice, who by the way, wasn't blond, nor had a light mien at all, unlike Disney's. My illustrations of Alice were based on her real countenance and looks.
EASTER EGGS
The book is filled with easter-eggs, and so are my illustrations. E.g. the Dodo bird, who is said to represent the author himself. Carroll's real surname was Dogson. And since he stuttered frequently, it often came out from his own lips as "Do-Do-gson". Thus, the "Dodo" in the book - which, in my illustrations, has Carroll's face, a human silhouette to its shadow, and wears the number 42 around his neck (it was Carroll's favorite number).
The Cheshire Cat's name comes from the Cheshire county, where cheese was molded in the shape of a grinning cat, back on the Victorian days. People would cut pieces out of said cheese, resulting on a cat who would slowly disappears. This is why the book character has a habit of disappearing in chunks. It's also why I painted its insides as cheese.
Similarly, the Mad Hatter also has it's name based on a Victorian tradition. It was a common to say that a crazy person was "mad as a hatter". This was because hatters used a lot of mercury in the making of felt hats, and many became mercury-poisoned, a condition which often brought madness upon it's bearer.
Likewise, the Mock Turtle also owns it's name to an expression from the past. In the Victorian days, eating turtle soup was a common habit of the most wealthy layers of society. It was an expensive dish. Those who couldn't afford it got by with "mock turtle soup", a cheaper version, made with often-discarded parts of a cattle or calf, like the head and the hooves. Therefore, the illustrated creature has a calf's head, and soup spoon legs.
AESTHETICS AND TYPOGRAPHY
Visuals were based on Victorian Era styles. Those times are known for the indiscriminate use of ornaments. Objects, architecture and interiors often featured mixed and wildly different styles . This is how I synthesized it: lots of geometric lines, lots of organic lines, and in both cases, lots of parallel lines. Illustrations of that era also had lots of parallel lines, i.e. hatching and cross-hatching. This became Alice's visual mooring. She is a Victorian character, anachronical as the puns that permeate the story. An old, grimy drawing amidst lots of paint, watercolor, vectors and digital colors.
This parallel-line shape language permeates the whole book. There are always masses of flowing, colorful parallel lines. They are both the building blocks of the drop caps that open each chapter, seen above, and the glue that holds together the illustration below.
This other set of drop caps above is a tribute to Carroll's original manuscript. I mixed blue and red blackletter typefaces with hand drawn ornaments to mimic his way of decorating the original text. Below: a comparison. Needless to say, the pages with text in Portuguese are the ones designed by me.
The idea of an ambigram logo came from Lewis Carroll's personality itself. He, who besides an author, was also a mathematician and inventor. Carroll apparently had a fascination for all things symmetrical - despite the fact that his own face was not a example of it - or maybe that was part of the reason? Regardless, his tales are filled with symmetrical elements, e.g the Tweedledum and Tweedledee twins, or the fact that Alice goes through a mirror on the second tale, finding a kind of reverse-world in there.
Above, on the left: you'll never be able to tell which side is up! On the right: another tribute to Carroll's playful nature. A small flipbook animation plays through the entire book. The hearts symbol appears for the first time exactly on the page where the Queen's chapter starts.
AFTERWORD
This project's first incarnation was born as a single prototype I printed in 2007, to show at my degree-completion assignment presentation. It won me a perfect score of 100. Later on, working at an advertising agency in 2010, I conquered the patronage of my employer, who funded the publishing of a small batch. It even made its way into local newspapers and a tv show - which you can watch below. I'd like to thank my wife, (girlfriend at that time!) for helping me translate the original text from english to Portuguese. Also thanks to my mother and aunt, for letting me use their house space for book storage. Also, I thank the design teacher who was my project advisor at the time, Thiago Colares, and 2Pontos Widebusiness for the first edition's sponsorship.
