Tales of a Driftwood is a book and not a travelogue. It does not tell you how to get there, where to stay and when to go. Instead it simply dwells on the innumerable joys of travelling, especially when it is unplanned.
We were asked to help design the book. The brief we received mentioned that the book was to have a simple design that should resonate with the author's idea that we all are, ultimately, driftwoods, floating in the current of time.
We began by first sketching out a layout.
For the title, we first chose the font as well as the format in which the title for the book will be written in.
We wanted the title of the book, which will be printed on the cover, to represent a driftwood. Hence we first chose the typeface for the title and then proceeded to make ripples, add waves to the typeface to make it look as if it is floating on water.
We subtracted few ripples and lines from the layout to make it look more clean and simple, without too many elements cluttering the design.
We illustrated the author in two different styles, again, matching the overall design for the book. The final illustration for the author required subtracting few extra lines and increasing the spacing between the strokes.
The complete design for the cover of the book.
After this we began illustrating the inside pages for the book.
The title for the pages was first illustrated which would name each new chapter of the book. Again, it required, multiple subtraction and spacing of lines and strokes to compliment the overall aesthetic of the design.
The journeys in this book cover more than 20 states in India and the neighbouring countries of Bhutan, Malaysia and Africa. It has stories of man-animal coexistence and man-animal conflict in Nature, as also stories of history and stories of anthropology. Hence, we inserted few blank pages with pictures of places alongside the chapter name.
The chapter names also, for such pages are mentioned in random alignments to give an overall effect of a driftwood.
In this project, we really wanted to integrate the author's philosophy that we, as individuals, are all driftwood, drifting, flowing with the current which in time shapes and molds us.
