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Baucis Wildlife Federation: Avian Ecology
Editorial 2024
This editorial was assembled as an exercise in both publication design and world-building, developing a publication inspired by and reflective of a city selected from Italo Calvino’s classic novel Invisible Cities (1972). Developing this publication required working as an editor, designer, and publisher, responsible for determining the subject matter, editorial approach, content, visual language, and overall design.
For this exercise, I decided to ground my editorial in the city of Baucis. In a translation of the book, the protagonist Marco Polo describes his journey to the city:
After a seven day’s march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spy glasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.
To begin this project, I selected my subject matter, assembled references, and decided upon the necessary content: one long text feature, an infographic with a map, an interview, and a birdwatching checklist. With these contents in mind, I drafted my initial flat plan, and began experimenting with type and grid. To ground my design in the city of Baucis, I drew upon notions of surveillance and the iconography of the telescope. With these elements assembled, I created numerous renditions, playing with variations in columns, point size, and color, all of which were consolidated into my final product.
References
Test Prints