Apr 6, 2017

ON TYRANNY – Timothy Snyder

Much has been said about this fascinating project - check out the links below:

https://electricliterature.com/a-new-book-on-resisting-tyranny-will-appear-in-poster-form-around-london-f0cb929647cc

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-book-about-resisting-tyranny-has-turned-into-an-incredible-public-art-project_us_58d53a53e4b03692bea50fd8

http://www.itsnicethat.com/news/vintage-publishes-on-tyranny-book-as-posters-in-london-240317

Essentially what started as an Ad campaign to publicise Timothy Snyder’s important new book about resisting tyranny, became a fully-blown art piece –
a complete book including epilogue and prologue in A0 poster form. The whole project took over Leonard St in East London for one week. The images above show the posters in situ.

So how did the CMYK team go about designing these?

We were briefed in-house to design one poster per chapter. Each member of the team designed one poster, and an extra - such as the epilogue, prologue and the quote at the beginning of the book. Our remit was to visualise the message of our given chapter however we saw fit – though there were some parameters to work within: the posters had to adhere to the colour palette of the cover – red, black and white; and biblio details at the base of each poster and the body copy of each chapter were standardised. 

The remaining posters/chapters were offered to the students on the second year of the Graphic Course at Kingston University. They split into groups of 3 or 4 for each poster. Each designer in-house and the students at Kingston were given the same brief.

The resulting artworks were varied and dynamic – each having their own visual character – however, as a set they work together. For a book of such importance this was a wonderful project to work on.

On Tyranny is published by the Bodley Head.

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