About the project
A series of digital illustrations, all covering different themes, but all related through the same color palette of red, blue and yellow.
About the project
A series of digital illustrations, all covering different themes, but all related through the same color palette of red, blue and yellow.
Portfolio
The Stories of Migration
2019/2020
Book design
About the project
"Stories of Migration - Voices of ex-Yugoslavia" is a book that I both wrote and designed. It tells the stories of migration of the people from the countries of ex-Yugoslavia and was created as a solution to the 2019/2020 ISTD Student Awards competition, whose brief asked for a typographical celebration of migration. The term "migration" was open to the interpretation of the designers.
The idea
Migration today tends to be seen as something big, heavy, violent, dark. We live in the age of the refugee crisis, as well as the constant reports of illegal immigrants. However, migration in its core definition means movement from one part of something to the other. It is natural and happens every day, with each step that we take, with each journey that we decide to go on.
My idea was to collect stories of five different participants, all expats who have moved from their country of origin - in this case, one of the countries of ex-Yugoslavia - and create a book illustrating and telling their stories, their emotions, their personal growth and changes they have experienced.
Typography as an illust rativ e tool
This book is occasionally purposefully designed not to be fully readable. Instead, it uses typography as a tool of illustrating the point of the story. The pages are designed to evoke a specific atmosphere, be it the one of a person who does not see very well, or the one of a person with chaos in their heads.
The writing systems
The book uses three writing systems specific to the area of the countries of ex-Yugoslavia - two still in the existence, and one that serves as a root to the southern Slavic languages. The first two ones are plain Latin letters (used in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina), Cyrillics (used in Serbia and Macedonia). The last one is the writing system called Glagolitic. Now extinct, this writing system served as the root of the modern-day Cyrillic and has specifications such as using the same symbol for a letter as a symbol for a number. This book uses Glagolitic as numerals for chapters, as well as details featured in each chapter.
The details
The details in the book, such as lines flowing throughout the pages, come from the idea of using the geographical specifications of each country in a symbolical way. For example, the lines are taken from the borders of the country featured on that page.
