Book design
"Tessék színt vallani!"
Print design, digital design, Design management
2020
Tibor Kosztolánczy made this biography of Ernő Osvát and the Nyugat; 1800 pages in two volumes with a planned third volume of an extra 700 pages. He used to be my university teacher and, and I dare to say it, a friend, so I said yes to his request immediately. It was only later that I realised what a great challenge and honour he had given me with this assignment.
The background
It’s always an honor to make a design for a life’s work, and this project was Tibor’s everything for 10 years, making these books landmarks in the hungarian history of literature. His request was to use his relative’s inkdrawing of flowers and a pattern she made. I didn’t really liked this request, since it’s a nightmare to work with anybody’s unfinished sketch, not to mention the ethics of it. But from Tibor I learned that the above mentioned designer, Ilona Greizinger, wanted to contribute in designs like that, and just like the era of the book, her work was made in 1919. I’m also in love with the era, and with the additional info, using Ilona Gerisinger’s art became a challenging, but also a nice gesture. Getting the green light, I took the aquarelles, redrew them in digital, and used them as a basic pattern that I can fit to the measurments of the books.
Not just the outcome and the material inside, but the thing to set an hommage to a late fellow designer and making a digital stylebook saving her work from 1919 to 2019 is a feeling that I hardly can put into words and I always be thankful for.
The outcome
I came up with a salmon-based green, and green-based salmon color layout for the books that got printed, and I made a third design with livid blue-gray and beige for the third book that is still under editing. The books got presented in the 90th Festive Book Week with a small panel talk with the authors and representative scinetists of the era, and both the work, and the design got really good critique. The book’s design – both the content and the looks – is not the usual history of literature-type feeling, but something that adequately demonstrates the era and it’s gloomy, still humorous and unique style.