The Giant and His Suit of Armour: Artist Book
Utopian Tales: Fairy Tales from Weimar Germany
The challenge for this project was to design and create an artist book based on Edwin Hoernle’s ‘The Giant and His Suit of Armour’ the book I created is inspired more by the stories political undertones than the story itself. Written in a time of political turmoil in Weimar Germany the book takes heavy influence from Hoernle’s Communist beliefs.
All hierarchy has been stripped from the text and book with all letters being lower case, all punctuation being removed in favour of a spacing system and all page furniture fitted into the body copy. This is then made more extremely ‘communist’ by adding all text into squares on a square page so everything remains even and equal and to further reflect the politics everything stays on the left with all recto pages being empty.
Accompanying Object
Communist Chess
The brief had one final challenge, to design and craft an object that could be packaged with the book. In a small team we built this chessboard and pieces. The game works similarly to normal chess, however in this instance one side represents the workers and the other represents the working classes with the sides having only pawns or higher ranked pieces respectively. The pieces are built from stacked and stamped coins to reflect the inflation crisis that struck Weimar Germany.
