Design of the Dansàneu Publicacions publishing house collection
Dansàneu, the Festival of cultures of the Pyrenees, commissions us to design a new publishing house, Dansàneu Publicacions. The publishing house, born from the Festival organized by the Consell Cultural de les Valls d’Àneu (Premi Nacional de Cultura 2021), aims to publish a book each year on contemporary culture (dance, music, etc) and will be related to the environment of the festival: the Pyrenean Catalonia.
The first volume, “Els focs de Sant Joan”, frames five texts by different authors and aims to mentally place the user in the culture of the faults of the Pyrenees. The text aims to explain the power of fire and the fallas, the dance and the contemporary musical composition of the composer Robert Gerhard.
In order to reference the characteristic fire of the fallas with the night of Sant Joan, a red paper printed in one ink has been used for the cover that is individually torn to make visible the raw and mass-tinted material that visually connects with the shape of a “flame”. And for the design, different elements have been worked on in the construction of the page: the typography of the headline (reference to the wooden logs of the fallas), the typography of the texts (which facilitates reading), the grid and the structure of the page (which seeks to explain on the one hand the movement and “dance” of the different elements of the design and also the idea that it is consumed by slow fire), the covers of each chapter and an offprint with a compendium of photographs.
Through the random manipulation of each volume, the book’s design seeks to create an iconic and unique object, while at the same time helping to establish an easy and pleasant reading environment. A careful editorial design proposal, conscious with the environment, with its content and with the meaning of the work reflected. All of this is done in an austere way and at the same time economizing production resources.
The second volume, “Del viure i de la terra, Palmira Jaquetti al Pallars i a la Ribagorça en les missions de recerca per a l’obra del cançoner popular de Catalunya” (From life and the land, Palmira Jaquetti in Pallars and Ribagorça in the research missions for the work of the popular cançoner of Catalonia) adapts the editorial design to the plot of the work. The idea is to seek a parallelism with the geographical journey through the Pallars area that Jaquetti made in search of popular songs through the game with the traditional mountain guides popularized, among others, by the Alpina publishing house in the middle of the last century.
The design consists of a set of maps, textures and legends typical of the language of mountain routes on paper and at the same time a graphic rhythm that plays with the model as do the notes of a pentagram.
