This narrative publication captures the raw essence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2014 and erupted into war soon after. I selected this subject matter because I am always fascinated by other cultures other than my own. The challenge in the initial research phase was avoiding having a narrative that felt similar to any other history publication. With that in mind, and reading articles in the New York Times, I approached my design methodologies from a journalistic perspective. From there, the idea of culture tied to individual identity became the overarching signifier.
Pulling from Words of War: New Poems for Ukraine by Oksana Maksymchuk, I took excerpts that resonated emotionally and I densely overlaid them on top of each other to create a typographic texture that resembled the charred quality of scathed concrete. These poems reflected the weight of voices grasping for solace to greet readers as they pick up the book.
For the spine, I used exposed binding, which reveals the signatures of books being held by glue alone. This binding feels naked and revealing, just as one would feel within wars, where building facades reveal skeletal infrastructures and citizens are left displaced.
Selected poems from Words of War: New Poems for Ukraine by Oksana Maksymchuk are interspersed in between chapters with a typographic structure that feels shaky and chaotic, frantically breaking from the underlying grid. Offering unbalance to the reader’s eyes as the text is scanned.
Breaking up the pacing, I included special bilingual callouts backdropped by gold, one of Ukraine’s national colors. I wanted to create a dialogue between the reader and the content, an added layer to the cultural identity of Ukrainians.
The challenge of curating a sequential narrative was telling the most important factors of Ukraine’s story that didn’t involve an atypical representation of war. It helped me to start with the youth, whose childhood is altered by destruction through nostalgic photography and then working towards cultural artifacts, contemporary artists, and social defiance.
Over the course of the project, I became curious about Ukrainian music, from classical to hip-hop, to better understand their individuality. I thought about radio stations as a constant stream of music and information. Expanding on that idea and the publication’s metaphoric title, I used p5.js to reveal the poems used within the book using a live Ukraine radio station.