Do the Cover
Susana XavierDesislava Danova
Graphic Elisava 2020
Lots of things tend to happen during a graphic.elisava master’s program. Mountains of research. Maybe one or two existential crises. Designing so much that you have nightmares about mismatched hex codes.
In some weird twist of fate, this year’s biggest ‘thing’ ended up being a global pandemic. We were forced to embrace digitalism over presentialism, do more with less, and channel disillusionment into positivity. In school, the lesson comes before the test, but life often takes the opposite approach. We think we’re better for it.
PLATFORM AND IDENTITY
For this year’s degree show we decided to continue the digitalist lifestyle that we’ve come to know. Pills replace name tags, thumbnails replace handshakes, and ingenuity replaces normality in order to illustrate how we view topics like “design ethics”, “comfort”, “manifestos”, and “freedom”.
About
This is graphic.elisava’s digital Degree Show. Find out more about the program at graphic.elisava.net
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to this year’s students in the Graphic Design and the Editorial Design master’s degrees. The 2020 graphic.elisava Degree Show – both the platform and the campaign that precedes it – wouldn’t have been possible without the indefatigable work of a group of design students making time for it in the middle of their end-of-year presentations.
On the typeface
Thanks to Non Foundry for letting us use their Non®Natural Grotesk throughout the website and campaign of this digital Degree Show.
Visit nonfoundry.com to find out more about their work.
Do the Cover
The anxiety
of creating a
good project.
A book about anxiety, stress, and pressure. A visual representation of the frustrations we face each day in our aim to create good work.
In our day to day life, we become engulfed in to-do lists, calendars, meetings, agendas, and emails all for the sake of achieving work satisfaction. We push aside our personal life as a secondary element in our daily routine and in some cases, we simply see it as an obligation or another line on our to-do list. Do The Cover explores that narrative in a direct and unfiltered way, showing the process of creating the book.
Do The Cover represents the anxiety of work. We, the creators, became anxious and stressed by our one single goal to do a good book project. We overplanned and listed each element. It was all a series of to-do lists and agendas that completely obsessed our lives for a month. Every concept change and every design switch became another task we had to complete. We were getting burned out and frustrated by the objectives we put for ourselves. Yet, in the middle of all this chaos, we saw the final concept of a pocketbook or stress.
In our day to day life, we become engulfed in to-do lists, calendars, meetings, agendas, and emails all for the sake of achieving work satisfaction. We push aside our personal life as a secondary element in our daily routine and in some cases, we simply see it as an obligation or another line on our to-do list. Do The Cover explores that narrative in a direct and unfiltered way, showing the process of creating the book.
