BAÚ
From the ancient knowledge of the old ones
to the poetic insights of the young ones
to the poetic insights of the young ones
Grandpas used to tell impressive stories about their young lives. As they passed away, we barely remember these stories. Likewise, many others have been lost in time around the globe. Baú aims to archive all these knowledge and memories and distribute them by free in cultural spaces (theatres, museums, etc.) from several districts in Portugal.
Bronze Award at the Creativity International Awards 2020
Nominated to the European Design Awards 2020
The contents were written in Portuguese and these were discovered by talking to friends who talked to their friends. At this first number, it was found poems from young philosophers and it was recovered the biography of an old woman. The edition of the contents was made in the first place, once each artist proposed various different texts.
Newspapers are to check the news and through away. Yet, Baú is to seat and read it and pass it through generations. In that sense, the design was directed in order to contradict the graphism of ordinary newspapers — for instance, using half-tabloid rather than the tabloid page size, big rather than a small body text or assuming justified alignment on the titles.
"Baú" was adopted as the main typeface. The poems relating to the monospaced typeface were scanned from the original scripts, written using an old writing machine; often, the texts are illustrated by sketches included in the original scripts or using simple stroke-only figures. For the biography, it was used a cursive typeface ("Tilda"), matching the original typewritten scripts.
It exists several ways of marking paragraphs, such as line break, extra space symbols or outdent. However, paragraph marking has been more and more standardized into line indentation. Contradicting the tendency, for the aforementioned biographic text, the paragraph are marked using scans from the original scripts, typewritten using an old writing machine. This approach both saves the old graphism of the scripts and re-explores the countless possibilities for paragraph marking. Also, it was defined some words which are no longer used or are specific from the author's village.
Visual-poems and concrete poetry approaches have been used for centuries for adding a second interpretation layer to texts. Likewise, with authors permission, some poems were redesigned using visual-poetry. Taking the concept furtherer, the page numbers were implemented using the respective number of trunk icons.
5000 units were printed and distributed for free from city to city, in Portugal. Offset printing was chosen once (i) its aesthetics better fit the contents (newspaper may be associated with old one's knowledge; we attempt to take the format to all ages once the Baú's contents maybe the news of next generations), (ii) the technique is better fitted for the number of units required, and (iii) the costs are better suited for the resources of the team. For the same reason, the publication was designed using a single color — black.
Baú is an independent and non-profit project founded by crowdsourcing and the goodwill of friends. The names of the contributors were placed on the back page. The project started in June 2018 in Coimbra, Portugal and printed in December 2019 in the same city.
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Thanks to the authors: bac, Gonçalo, Ninguém, Teresa Devesa/Emília Parente/Jéssica Parente.
Thanks to the donators: Zé dos Leitões, RR, FIG – Indústrias Gráficas SA, Carmo Teixeira, Penousal Machado, Ana Lopes, Pedro Martins,Ricardo Lopes, João Correia, Beatriz Correia, Inês Duverge, Jéssica Parente, Mariana Seiça, Sérgio Rebelo, Cátia Roça, Andreia Lopes, João Marques, Catarina Maçãs, Pedro Silva e Beatriz Ferreira.
Thanks to those who helped in the distribution: Cátia Roça, Pedro Silva, Rúben Cunha, Susana Francisco, Gilberto Pereira.
Design: Danie'Lopes.
Edition: Ivan Laranjeiro & Danie'Lopes.
Revision: Cátia Roca & Danie'Lopes.
180mm x 260mm; 16 pages; Black only; Offset printing; 5000 units; No staples; No package; Free distributed; No package (Delivered in stacks in cultural spaces in Portugal);
