Masks
Book cover, illustrations and layout
Book cover, illustrations and layout
I am proud to do my job when it is all about poetry. Ukrainian poetry is full of vision, of strange things and rhytms. The book title unbounds all the cross-culture stories between the mask and the face under.
Usually i mix up digital and hand-drawn images in my work. Masks is a story about layers. We can see flat pure image, but also we can imagine the deepness.
Finally «Masks» is tiny book, full of touchable images and words.
I used photos from Julia Musakovska's archive with steets where she was during different travels. You can see the same buildings and the same things she saw, but not in the same way. Poetry gives us not only the signal, the meaning, the message. It provides noise, communicational glitch, nonsence. And the melody.
I also used photos by Leonardo Aguiar and Nikki Leeyen as a source and refercence.
The inspiration source for playing around ink (as a true poem blood) is a beggining of «Kwaidan» movie. If you like ghost stories, i reccomend you watch this out.
The inspiration source for playing around ink (as a true poem blood) is a beggining of «Kwaidan» movie. If you like ghost stories, i reccomend you watch this out.
I also used a lot of pencil graphics — i am totally in love with rough feeling of live line. Some things become more impressionable after scan and going to black and white. Some things found its usage between my will and impression of the author, like this girl dancing and playing on the top of the tree, who come out from the cover to the small illustration peace.
I found the sources of inspiration everyvere — from documentary about Sally Mann to famous Tarkovsky's «The Mirror», from history of European clothing to books about African tribal art.
Before i took Circe font for the cover, i even tried (twice, heh) to do lettering. Today i think this glitchy background with a geometrical font is more nice couple than i expected.
Sergiy Tkachenko even made font from Julia Musakovska's handwritten letter, but later i used his beautiful font Ola Script. The main font of entire layout is PT Serif by ParaType.
Julia gave us manuscript with very interesting structure — three acts with day and night part in each of them, two (or three) intermedies, prologue and epilogue. It was real pleasure to build a book with this, and i hope the reader (who can read in Ukrainian) will enjoy the poems itself and the entire impressive play which gave us the author.
This book was published by Smoloskyp in 2011.
You can buy it in publisher's bookstore (where i've worked five years):
And this year was another one book, «ZOO» by Karin Tumaeva that hope i will show soon.
Thank you!
Julia reads her book. Photo by Nadiyka Gerbish.
