The goal with Six was to typeset and design a curated selection of stories extracted from James Joyce’s novel, Dubliners. The novel itself is made up of 15 short stories depicting the lives of those living in Dublin, Ireland in the early 1900s. The stories being utilized in this project will portray narratives of love, growth, decay, good, and evil. These contrasting elements all make up the continuing dichotomy of life and death seen throughout all stories featured in this project.

The themes of life and death both repeat throughout James Joyce’s stories. Six was designed to take advantage of that juxtaposition in text and manifest it into an experience. Cinematic image layout showcases the tension of such deep-seated themes. While reading Six, users are taken through an experience of the waxing and waning that life and death can bring. 

The mirroring of this image creates interest and intrigue in the reader while the image itself paints a tale of aging, life itself is happening right before your eyes. Using two whole pages for this image not only gives the reader a break while reading, but also helps tell the story through imagery.

Pantone 704 is used subtly throughout with small hints of the deep blood red in headers, footers, and headlines. Symbolic of the grim undertone of Dubliners, blood red is used to express a feeling in itself.

Loose leading and a sufficient amount of white space creates a pause, a moment of reflection for the reader. Baskerville, a classic serif typeface, gives the user a sense of familiarity while reading through the body text. Pull quotes are set in italic to further emphasize the dream-like ambiguity of the major themes.

Six was inspired by the beautiful work of Abelardo Morell and photographs that conveyed great emotion, that alone told an elaborate story.

The cover design in particular went through many iterations, above is just a snippet of the process.

The cover itself needed to sum up the entire theme of the book in just two pages. Using the same mirroring technique as was used inside, the idea of conflict is portrayed to the reader right away. Tension is showed through the type, the title is placed in a small area between the edge of the book and the person in the image. Most importantly balance is used through the symmetry of the front and back images as a whole.