World Literature Book Series

This was an exam work for Typography Classes of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. The final task has been defined as a complete cover, front and body matter design of a fictional book series entitled the self-explanatory “World Literature Book Series” of novels from the international literature history. The idea of the illustration came from one of my earlier Context Free Design Grammar experiments “Long Mail to Home”, a sheet of a nonsense handwriting replica. The magnification of some parts of the letter-like shapes into an extremely large size resulted in forms of creatures. (The same process was used in the case of the Psychosis CD booklet art.) Having a series of similar illustrations at hand, I used them for the covers and the spines. All the rest of the front and back were designed on a minimal approach using only two colors, featuring the usual ChaletComprimé typeface created by Paul van der Laan. As for the inlay, I have chosen a serifed, relatively unique but still highly legible family: the Warnock Pro from Adobe, designed by the fantastic Robert Slimbach. The family contains one of the widest range of glyphs varying from the basic latin ones through several Eastern European diacritics and Cyrillic-written languages making it an ideal pick for a series featuring author names from all across the world. Designing the flowtext for a polite literature book is one of the trickiest and hardest work a typographer can meet. If ever, this is the last moment one can collapse the myth of the “equally distributed letters flushed from a bag onto the paper”—moreover, this is the not so rare situation where the tiny details matter so much, they alone can tilt the final product from ugly to beautiful. For example, making use of the Roman Hanging Punctuation technic, the right side of the text showed an aligned, straight line—whilst the left one resulted in an inconsequently ragged, unequally spaced form, thanks to the same algorithm. The beginnings of the dialogues—in contrast to the English syntax, the Hungarian rules use here the En Dash (–) glyph followed by a fixed width space—required a massive hack involving negative indentation values with therefore invisible blank characters, special paragraph styles for the first lines, etc., which produced a balanced edge on the left side too.