Editorial of the THIN CITIES chapter and book cover design for the whole book of INVISIBLE CITIES of Italo Calvino at Porto Design Summer School 2017 under the mentoring of Andrew Howard, Catherine Griffiths, Hamish Muir, and David Pearson.
55 symbols for the 55 cities.
The book itself contains rich beauties of structuralism and semiotics, especially in the table of content. All the stories involved in the book are about casual conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Because of the difference of language of the two person, the way of their communication filled with gestures, key words and facial expression, that makes all the description of the cities like maze, in which it pushes all readers need to seek their own cities following their heart and mind while reading. Besides, these kind of ambiguous images and description become much more attractive and charming rather than precise language. Seeking within maze, everything is explicit and confusing, everything has its clues or not, and all the stories are about made up of fragments of dreams.
Content as cover, everything should be almost invisible, everything should contains rich information or not...
Thus, in this project, I created 55 symbols for the 55 cities, in which to make the fantasy of the cities visually fantasy as well.
Thus, in this project, I created 55 symbols for the 55 cities, in which to make the fantasy of the cities visually fantasy as well.
《看不見的城市》伊塔羅·卡爾維諾
整本書踐行著作者對於結構主義和符號學的趣味，尤其毫無保留的呈現在目錄之中。馬可波羅向忽必烈描述他在旅途上見到的十一種城市，每個種類分別有五座城，一共五十五座城。由於語言的障礙 所有的口述都只能藉由手勢、表情、單獨的字詞、符號等方式在兩人之間傳遞。由此讓模棱兩可的圖像比語言更豐富也更有趣味，讓讀者免去語言那種過度而虛幻的清晰。所有的故事亦像是由夢境的碎片堆疊而成，像謎。讀書的人要小心別陷入詞與物、名字與真實的對應和隱喻之中，進入它們，並在其中走動，可能會找到出口，也可能不能。那些圖像的碎片帶著我們或許找到自己的世界…
