MAKING WAVES
Booklet / November 2019
This is a booklet I designed together with Daniel Seiple for his volunteer-initiative "Making Waves" in Berlin. The project invites refugees to build their own boat. I've been documenting their workshop in the last couple of years at irregular intervals with my camera, and we built the booklet around a small selection of the photos that were taken by me and others. The booklet - as well as the nearly finished boat! - will be presented at the Berlin Boat Fair in November 2019
We mixed a lot of different styles and ideas into the layouts (see production notes beneath the images), and it's all printed on 350g matte paper for the cover, and 170g matte paper for the inside, so it doesn't look or feel cheap.
All in all the result is quite 'piratey' and ironically subversive, yet the booklet has a luxurious look & feel to it, and is as much informative as it is minimal in its execution.
I like how all the different parts came together...
PRODUCTION NOTES
- the cover looks trashy yet valuable. The logo is printed in Pantone Silver on top of a gritty defaced poster announcing the same fair the boat will be presented on (photo by Sean Smuda)
- on the inside pages we mostly tried to emulate the aesthetics of a classical brochure for yachts, but filling it with rather subversive content
- the center-fold looks like a take on a heist-movie involving speedboats – it's showing three of the guys from the workshop piloting a motorboat in front of a digitally enhanced sunset. I wanted it to look a bit like a filmstill from a Bollywood version of "Miami Vice". I wanted it to look a tiny bit 'over the top', contrasting and breaking the clean aesthetics of the pages before
- the white logo on black (which was designed by Daniel) on the double-page at the end of the booklet plays with 'terrorist aesthetics': in its translation it just means "Making Waves". It's a visual pun playing with the readers' pre-assumptions and prejudices, especially with regard to the photo on the page before
