'HYDROGEN' is an editorial project I designed for the 2013 istd brief 'Books, Still?'.
It is a factual book about the element, which has three sections, section 1) discusses the structure, section 2) hydrogen in space, and section 3) describes how hydrogen acts in chemistry.
To celebrate the existence and importance of the printed book I used educational books as my inspiration. Research suggests that reading information from a physical publication you are more like to remember its content, this is extremely important in education but also applicable in everyday life, naturally people want to remember what they have just read, whether it be for pleasure or informative. Digital publications are very convenient, but I believe they wont kill the book because of the natural instinct we have to read from a physical book. Designers and many other creative types love books but these are only the opinions of individuals, I wanted to look into the scientific reason as to why physical books are still being used, Educational books are a perfect, unbiased example of why books are so important.
For my research I studied the traditional layouts of educational books like children’s encyclopedias, A-level textbooks, University Chemistry books and adult factual books. I used aspects from these books and designed the editorial piece hydrogen with an alternative design solution. The random typography layouts represent hydrogen as a gas molecule and also stimulates cognitive learning, hence encouraging the reader to retain the information they’ve just read. Each spread has is own colour scheme and unique design, thus memory is again encouraged by association. The cover was made using GF Smith colorplan in china white 275 gsm, to represent the true colour of the universe ‘cosmic latte’ which is made mostly from hydrogen.
