Over the Dinner Table
Melissa Gómez
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.
Over the Dinner Table
Food serves as a social opportunity
It’s a worldview and a style thought about sociology, history, art, cultural criticism, politics, and food.
Over the Dinner Table is a book that revolves around food serves as a social opportunity. It tackles the importance of dinner as a social engagement where people are open to debate, dialogue, and change. Many decisions that had enormous historical consequences have been made over the dinner table, and have been accompanied, and perhaps influenced, by copious amounts of food and wine. The book does this throw 9 chapters and an essay. Each chapter covers every detail, character, decision, and morsel which decided the course of history.
The book faces the absolute act of eating together, where big conversations were had, movements were sparked, presidents made or defeated, or even inventing new TV shows.
Through the content, of the book, it explores decadence, survival, love, forgiveness, and heck, a bit of humility, all play roles in what makes a dinner to remember. Besides the dinners, the books also talk about, why food is so important in our social landscape, and how sharing food has always been part of the human story. It’s a worldview and a style thought about sociology, history, art, cultural criticism, politics, and food.
At what point during the meal does it become evident that something extraordinary is brewing, and can any on the guests foresee the momentousness of the occasion?
Each chapter promotes that, while eating dinner is in itself, an ordinary ritual, there are just a few dinners that mad for extraordinary legends. As a result, the book is devoted to answering how does the food serves as a reflection of, or foil to, the history-making consequences of the meal?
Over the Dinner Table objective is to render the big picture of the topic, represented through the entirety of the book. This is achieved through the light-hearted design and short narratives. That allows the book to have two different designs. It aims to highlight the most important sentences of each chapter, giving the reader a more simple approach to the topic.
It’s a reflection of decisions that changed the course of history.
The importance of dinner as a social engagement where people are open to debate, dialogue, and change.
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