Lands of Glass

Book Cover Design - Art Direction

A handmade creative project and art direction developed for the book cover design of Lands of Glass by Italian author Alessandro Baricco.

Lands-of-glass

The Challenge

A handmade creative project and art direction developed for the book cover design of Lands of Glass by Italian author Alessandro Baricco.

Lands-of-glass

The Idea

The novel is built around the stories of various characters, whose lives are somehow connected and interlaced.

Full of references to real facts, Lands of Glass is halfway between idea and reality, between the impossible and the possible, between rationality and sentiment.

Lands-of-glass

The Solution

Two sets of raw wooden Russian dolls were used for the creation of the book design to represent the connection of each character in the novel; both sets were painted in black on the outside, and with warm colours on the inside. The colour choice for the matryoshka dolls was given by the life stories of each character in the novel, stories of every day lives that encounter moments of darkness, but that carry on fiery and bravely.

One set of dolls was then broken, as people's lives always carry something broken within themselves.

Type was kept simple and minimal to ensure a full focus on the image being shown.

Lands-of-glass