Boredom

• Contribution to Heren, January 2016
• 2016

Seven designers were invited to propose speculative cover designs for a range of books, and we chose Yi Sang’s short story Boredom (1937). What we found particularly interesting about the architecture-trained, avant-garde writer’s body of work is that his compositional principles are relatively clear, yet their meanings are not. For this design, we made twenty-four permutations of the four Korean characters that make up the writer’s name and the title of the piece. Treating the strings as twenty-four potential story titles – some are simply nonsensical – we arranged them in alphabetical order. It’s not easy to spot the real title among them, but it was not meant for a real publication anyway.

• Project type:
• publication

• Typeface:
• SM Gyeonchulgothic

• Commissioner:
• Heren