Memento Flori
Delve Into the Dark Side of Flowers
This book was created for the class Advanced Problems in Graphic Design Senior Seminar at UMSL under the instruction of Jen McKnight, and it was created over the span of one semester.
Memento Flori is a book about the dark side of flowers. The name came from the common phrase memento mori, which is an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. I adapted the phrase to memento flori, because a lot of the flowers in my books relate to the topic of death.
In the beginning, I wanted to create a book about the different symbolic meanings of flowers across the world, but I felt like that was too broad and it needed a hook. I was interested in the negative Victorian meanings of flowers, which sparked my idea to make a book about the dark side of flowers. After a month of research I narrowed down the content for my book to the topics poisonous flowers, grotesque flowers, invasive flowers, Victorian meanings, carnivorous flowers, and the cut flower industry.
I first focused on the typography. I used the typefaces Sheepman, URW DIN Cond, and Mrs Eaves XL Serif OT. I established a hierarchy of serif and sans typefaces which would keep the reader engaged and help me define the many levels of content from headings, subheads, captions, and quotes. For the illustrations I chose to do detailed contour line drawings. I didn’t want all the illustrations to be the exact same, so for some of the illustrations I have an offset background behind the contour lines.
