A handmade creative project and art direction developed for the book cover design of Lands of Glass by Italian author Alessandro Baricco.
This concept was created as part of the Handmade Project at Shillington College.
THE CHALLENGE
Lands of Glass is Alessandro Baricco's first fiction book: the novel is a collection of human stories and characters, each with his own dreams and uniqueness.
Lands of Glass is a novel about hopes and aspirations, where absurd, grotesque and dramatic events link the lives of its protagonists.
THE STRATEGY
The novel is built around the stories of various characters, whose lives are somehow connected and interlaced. Full of references to real facts, Lands of Glass is halfway between idea and reality, between the impossible and the possible, between rationality and sentiment.
THE IDEA
Two sets of raw wooden Russian dolls were used for the creation of the book design to represent the connection of each character in the novel; both sets were painted in black on the outside, and with warm colours on the inside. The colour choice for the matryoshka dolls was given by the life stories of each character in the novel, stories of every day lives that encounter moments of darkness, but that carry on fiery and bravely. One set of dolls was then broken, as people's lives always carry something broken within themselves.
Type was kept simple and minimal to ensure a full focus on the image being shown.
