Windhover

Windhover is North Carolina State’s literary arts journal, featuring works submitted by students, faculty and alumni. When designing a piece like this, the challenge is not only to showcase the work, but also to provide a curatorial voice. Through the selection process, the concept became obvious: the relationship between authenticity and fragmentation.

The canonization of form is detrimental to creativity and has planted an unspoken feeling that everything has already been done. Though many ideas, themes, forms and concepts have been explored, the context in which these things occur is always changing. To illustrate this point, I ran all of the literary submissions through anti-plagiarism software. The resulting cross-reference exposed the ridiculousness of form without context and was shown as annotations throughout the book.

The range of materials is a subtle reference to the fragmented channels through which we receive information and how these materials contribute to or detract from the authenticity of information. The exposed binding (signature to book), the use of magenta (one ink in a four-color process), and the box as a container of individual pieces are meant to show parts to whole and fragmentation to synthesis.