Beyond Art
Client
Afaf Zurayk
Date
2020
Credits
Team: Twig Collaborative
Collaborator: Afaf Zurayk (Artwork & poems)
Videography: Tarek Qiblawi
Role
Editorial design, layout, print production
Printed and bound in Lebanon, Beyond Art brings together poems and paintings that artist Afaf Zurayk created during the COVID pandemic lockdown. The book reveals the deeply introspective nature of quarantining and of discovering one’s self in isolation.
Beyond Art is a prayer that invites the reader in a non-linear emotional narrative that captures the sentiments of the moment. In a world that is constantly rearranging itself, friendship and love endure to pave the way for a more hopeful future. The art book, our fourth collaboration with the artist, was selected through an international open call to be featured in the exhibition “Art in Isolation: Creativity in the time of COVID19” by the Middle East Institute’s Arts & Culture Center in Washington D.C..
The challenge when designing the art book was to ensure that Zurayk’s disparate forms of artwork, present as both text (poems) and image (paintings), maintain a similar hierarchy for the reader. The design of the layout achieves this by creating one cohesive body of work with no two pages alike. Not repeating layouts ensures that each spread is a result of its contents, which creates an organic rhythm and flow for the reader. It was important to steer away from having images that reference text or text that reference images, which is what a reader would normally expect.
The layout built on the Van De Graaff canon of page construction and divine proportions to band word with image. Using these references, we created a grid that delineates a set area that contains all the book’s content including texts, images, and page numbers. We also utilized the pagination to draw out our layout area by drawing the eye to corners and referencing its invisible borders.
Twig designed Beyond Art as an object. Its portable size, proportion, and rotated text are calling out for readers to pick it up, hold it, and interact with it.
Beyond Art is available for purchase on shop.twigcollaborative.com.
