A Reimagining of Dubliners by James Joyce
This project was undertaken as part of my editorial design module at the Dublin Design Institute in 2022. We were tasked with choosing a chapter from a banned book of our choice and visually interpreting it using type by both print and digital means. I chose "Araby," a short story contained in Dubliners which explores a day in the life of a young boy who travels to the local market to buy a present for a girl he has feelings for who lives across the road.
During my research, I came across some of Joyce’s original manuscripts. I discovered that as his sight deteriorated, he began to write in red crayon on large sheets of white paper in order to see his edits more clearly. I was fascinated by these erratic crayon strokes, which often made little sense to anybody but Joyce himself. It felt like he was leaving clues for the reader by designing a labyrinth of lines around his words. I decided to design a brush in Illustrator inspired by these crayon marks, and created illustrations using the brush which reflected the motifs in the story.
I hoped to capture the sense of of paralysis and entrapment felt by the characters in Dubliners. I chose to use three columns and only half the page for many of them because I wanted to give the effect that each block of body copy represented a window in a house (the square page being the walls of the house itself). Tenement houses were common in Dublin during this time, and there is a motif of windows throughout the novel, as well as railings, chains, barbed wire, and rosary beads.
By reimagining Joyce’s work using a combination of illustrative elements and contemporary typefaces, I hope to make Dubliners more accessible to new audiences.
