by Zoë Lehoux

Image credits: Zoë Lehoux, tortoon

I decided a few years ago to go into book design, a field that it turns out sits at an odd (but delightful) intersection of the worlds of publishing and design. I took an undergraduate degree in fine art, focussing my assignments as much as I could on book design. Now I’m in Centennial’s publishing program to hopefully balance out my education across the two fields a bit better. I decided that I’d spend the time learning to write quick and natural calligraphy, since I would be taking lots of notes for the first time since university, and that was a skill that would undoubtedly help me with making hand-lettering faster than my previous neat, but slow and careful, cursive.

With this year’s digital theme of Dear Danforth, there was a fun opportunity to integrate that a little, so I chose to make many of the graphics of the website hand-lettered or traced with my calligraphy pen and scanned for use on the website, embracing the blots and feathering created in this process. The colour palette was then based on the dark jewel tones often found in calligraphy inks. The confessional theme with letters lent itself well to this, and I leaned into an old-fashioned newspaper theme for the main fonts, with an additional cursive handwriting font to compliment those and tie them together with the hand-lettering of the other material. Images were “taped” down to give a scrapbook feel. It’s a bit of a chaotic blend of letters, newspaper, and scrapbook aesthetics, but those so often overlap that together they looked quite natural. Unfortunately, WordPress and the web medium limited us rather a lot and most of my time working with my design team has been figuring out what is and isn’t possible to implement.

For articles other than the front matter, I wanted to give the graphic design team all opportunities to express themselves creatively and have a bit more freedom to design more specifically for each article. In a print magazine I think I would have opted for more visual cohesion as you flip through, but a digital magazine can get away with a bit more variation, as people most commonly read just one article at a time, rather than flipping through and reading the entire issue. There are common elements throughout each article as I did still want to keep a unified theme, but articles each have their own unique visual identities to match each designer’s vision and allow them to explore a wider variety of aesthetics and ideas. I’m quite pleased with the variety of work everyone’s come up with and how each design is so well-suited to the article’s content.

Overseeing the incredible digital design team has been an amazing opportunity to try this out early in my career and I’ve enjoyed it a lot so far. I’m so grateful for my amazing team for all their hard work and fun ideas, so a big thank you to them. A special thank you to my art director Alex, who has been invaluable and a great collaborator. I’m excited for everyone to see what we all come up with in this and coming issues!