JM Othoniel

I was tasked with creating a book cover and spreads for the artist along with reinterpreting that book design in an e-book form for an exhibition based on his work.

I came up with several ideas where I played with transparency. The key design choice I shaped the project around was hiding most of the cover with its jacket. His works are worlds of theirs, an odyssey of sorts; I thought of having a window into his work revealing the world behind it. It's calm, reflective and mesmerizing like glass.

At first, I was going to create a slipcase, but then I realized that a jacket would work just fine and wouldn’t increase the book’s weight as a slipcase would. I created a die cut in the middle of the jacket and placed the text as if it were an old-fashioned fairytale storybook. The spreads have a mirrored layout to reflect the properties of glass. For the title, I used an elegant serif and contrasted it with a geometric sans serif to help with legibility.