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Design Category
Book design, 2002
Design firm
studio ABCd (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
Collection
(2003) 50 Books/50 Covers of 2002
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The client, Alphabet City Media, is a cultural studio based in Toronto that has been producing multidisciplinary anthologies, conferences and exhibitions since 1991. Lost in the Archives—an expansive collection of visual art and writing about the contemporary state of knowledge storage—was the studio’s most ambitious effort to date. The design challenge was daunting: a massive bulk of disparate works had to be presented in an accessible, navigable and unified object. To encourage readers in shaping their own archival narratives, design elements that control the content (section dividers, chapter starts, headings) were understated, while individual pieces were elaborated in great detail; for one piece we designed new glyphs from hand-drawn notations for a nearly extinct Bushman language.