125 years anniversary
Editorial Design, Copywriting & Photography
The german city Mainz is known for the invention of the modern letterpress machine by Johannes Gutenberg. It's the gathering point of many bookbinders. For the 125 anniversary of the oldest bookbinding workshop Gärtner we designed an almanac. Four bookbinders, four chapters – each one contains the biography and history of this place.
Semester project: 2016
University of Applied Science Mainz, Germany
The concept
Enhancing the atmosphere and little anecdotes from the bookbinders history was our goal. Therefore we decided to separate each chapter in two sections: one presenting the biography of each bookbinder and the other one revealing objects we found at this place which tell interesting stories about this magical world of workshop. Overall we collected 12,5 items for each chapter – the 13th item should connect the previous bookbinder with the following one. In addition to that the entire text in the almanac was written by ourselves after hours and hours of interviews and research.
The Book
For a modern and simple look we chose four colors representing each bookbinder and his timeline. Using a sans-serif font and a varying color palette for the biography part we decided to complement the aura of the bookbindery by relying on a plain serif-typeface with playful details describing the objects and its stories. Details like the two different formats to separate the chapters and the sew binding performed by the 125 year old bookbindery Gärtner make the almanac's design modern and yet flexible.
