Words on Dance

A typographic exploration of Efva Lilja’s Words on Dance.

Process

As someone who used to dance, this project was very personal to me. There is no right answer to how we describe movement, and I found Efva Lilja’s Words on Dance describes the formation of dance and choreography in a poetic and dynamic way.

The goal of this project was to create a new home for this publication. The original piece was quite minimal, a basic manuscript grid layout and was organized based on Lilja’s journal entries. I chose to reorganize the layout based on the different words that were highlighted throughout the piece: the dance, now, darkness, chaos, madness, time and hem (home). Since I read the majority of the piece in a poetic manner, I wanted to emphasize this factor by separating each paragraph into lines that jump from page to page in order to emphasize this idea of movement that moves continuously as you read throughout. Although it may not be a proper grid structure, it plays with this idea of movement in itself as “dancing text.”

The title pages derived from my own artistic practices where I created my own hand drawn ink display letters, one capital letter each word in the contents list. After setting up the entire document, the design play began where I went through each word and attempted to mimic the body text layout based on that word.

In the end, contrast became the main factor for this publication, where the usage of thin lines with the heavy ink letters work together in a whimsical manner. The final printed publication is 6”x6”, featuring a vellum dust cover.