Book design
Bryd igennem
Cover design, cover illustration and interior layout for Ole Grünbaum’s manifesto about breaking through the walls that keep us from imagining another future.
Bryd igennem is an angry, generous and impatient book — a manifesto, a call for change, an outburst and a declaration of love at the same time.
At the first meeting with the editor, I asked, a little cautiously: “It’s not a coffee-table book, right?” “No — just do something fun with the lettering on the cover,” came the reply. It was an open brief: simple on the surface, but with plenty of room to find the actual visual idea.
I could not get the energy of the text to work as lettering alone. The book needed something more physical. I wanted to punch a hole in a wall. A dirty crater. A torn opening in the surface of the cover.
That is what it became: a red wall, a rough opening and a glimpse of blue sky on the other side. The title is spray-painted across the surface — a polished designer’s version of vandalism, maybe, but still close enough to the impulse behind the book.
I actually went looking for concrete walls. And even though real graffiti would have been entirely in the spirit of the project, I could not quite bring myself to spray-paint a wall in the city. In the end, the old concrete wall was found anyway.
The cover had to feel like pressure from the inside. Not decoration. Not attitude added afterwards. A surface about to give way.