Typography: ISTD Invisible cities
Project summary
Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities has no plot nor character development. It is a collection of stories told by Marco Polo to the emperor Khan. Each story is about a unique fantastical city, which is placed under a specific theme. This project requires a new edition of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The new edition should form a radical retelling of the story, which explores the cities visually trough typography, which also reflects their own unique characteristics and idiosyncrasies. It can either be a book or a digital outcome.
Project deliverables
1. Strategy
2. Research
3. Concept and design development
4. Specifications
5. Presentation
Rationale
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, contains old tales of Polo’s adventures in different cities in emperor Khan’s realm. Though Polo’s way of telling the tales is quite intricate and can get difficult to engage with or to understand. This is especially the case when people have no interest in reading complicated books. The target audience is anyone who is not necessarily interested in reading books, or rather older books.
The idea is to create a new experience for those who are not interested in reading books. Interactions and animations are used to motivate people to engage with these stories in a unique and a more understandable way. Since mobile phones are used most of the time, the new edition of Invisible cities is created for mobile use. It can be understood as a travel guide on their phones to explore each city and their uniqueness. Users can choose a city to explore from a selection where animation is used to give an idea what the city is about. The animation is also used to create a spark of interest for the user to go read more about the city. It is thus important that the animation communicates the correct feeling and meaning of each city.
Book interpretation and concepts
Refined concept
Colour and font exploration
The colours are a combination of old adventurous colours, like the warmer colours, and modern digital colours, like blues and bright turquoise. The fonts are a combination of the old and the new. Adobe Garamond is a screen-based version of the old font, Garamond which has different stroke weights to explore with for each city. Proximia Nova is a modern version of an old, discontinued font. Its geometric shapes balance out the organic shapes of Adobe Garamond. The reason for the old and modern combination is to make the design appropriate for today’s contemporary audience, keeping a sense of Polo's old adventures.
Specifications
Final designs
Colours and typography is used to present unique aspects of each city. Typography is manipulated and laid out to present different aspects of each city. Wayfinding is applied through navigation between screens. The user’s eye is lead to each button through either animation, indicators or the way typography is laid out.
Final presentation
The final outcome is a digital travel guide for mobile phones but with the content similar to a book. The user gets a short introduction to what the content is where they then can navigate to a selection of cities to swipe through. When the user chooses a city, they are taken to a page about the chosen city.
