LEVELS OF LIFE - Julian Barnes
‘You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed…’ Julian Barnes’s new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded him the 2011 Man Booker Prize described him as 'an unparalleled magus of the heart’. This book confirms that opinion.
We were captivated by the text and immediately set about finding visual expressions to match its content. For a while we developed a series of typographic designs where the author and title gradually submerged into different coloured levels. This idea was gradually paired down until it became simpler, bold and stark revealing an elegant and classic layout that felt redolent of Barnes’ text. We wanted the cover to be evocative of the surprising silence you experience on a balloon trip, the other worldliness, the stifled fear and suspense.
The balloon on the cover hovers awkwardly between the letterform both providing the dot on the ‘I’ in life but also it is suspended as if an exclamation mark. It gently floats above but also intrudes.
All the lettering was carefully painted, hand rendered in ink and watercolour – bringing a very personal, fluid and intimate feel to the cover reflecting those aspects of the text. It also subtly alludes to The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes’ Booker-winning novel from 2011.
We researched a lot of balloon imagery. The balloon used is a detail from a drawing showing the balloon ascent made by James Glaisher on 5 September 1862 and is sourced from the Science and Society Picture Library based at the Science Museum, London.
