The Tartar Steppe - Transparent book

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The plot of the novel is Drogo's lifelong wait for a great war in which his life and the existence of the fort can prove its usefulness. Drogo spends his career waiting for the barbarian horde rumored to live beyond the desert. Without noticing, Drogo finds that in his watch over the fort he has let years and decades pass and that, he has come away with nothing except solidarity with his fellow soldiers in their long, patient vigil.

Original cover of "The Tartar Steppe"

The design concept of the book is that we analyzed the plot of the book itself, the characters, the ambience. All lead to that the novel itself has an unclear path, in which the characters themselves end up spending years wasting their lives away for nothing.

We picked up keywords to help us to understand which path to take towards a new design concept for the book. We understood that the book has a monoton atmosphere, expecting the unexpected, lack of characterization, very dry, very emotionless, dramatic and mysterious, and most important key word for us is the lack of clarity.

With the technique of visual writing, we were able to visually tell the story of The Tartar Steppe through its unreadable texts.

Based on the key word (lack of clarity), we managed to come up with a consistent design concept, from its cover, to its inner pages.

From a color psychology perspective, grey is the color of compromise - being neither black nor white. The closer grey gets to black, the more dramatic and mysterious it becomes.

The Tartar Steppes’ dialog is so dry, there is emptiness and desolation, for which the Tartar Steppe is a metaphor to convey the feeling of the book, both, the grey and black, have their own perspective.

The choice of the paper itself plays part in the consistency of both the choice of color and the mood of the novel itself.

Transparent paper conveys both the lack of clarity in its transparency through the text where as you open the book, the text is not clear to read. And for its color, stacks of the paper itself gave this greyish effect; more dramatic and mysterious.

To show the lack of clarity through the pages, number are placed in different sequence that as a result, it gave this disappearing, gradient look which matches the book design concept itself.

To stay consistent with the idea, the cover itself reflects the inner pages through its color and its title. Its relief style title is to convey the lack of clarity and its black color cover is to convey the emotionless of the novel itself; the dramatic and mysterious atmosphere of the content.

For the reader to be part of the novel, and to make it easier to read, a greyish paper but still transparent, has been placed in the book as part of the concept.