Éphémère

book design

Timeline: 10 weeks (Winter 2020)

Éphémère is a book project that transforms an ephemeral phenomenon into a permanent product. Compiled within this book are a series of collages, organized by colour. All of the shapes used within the collages were generated by filming ink as it was dropped into water.

The Idea

For my 4th year thesis project, I decided to center my project on the concept of ephemerality. After several weeks of research, I settled on creating an artbook displaying the many shapes created from a session of dropping fluorescent ink into a receptacle of water in a dark room. The goal was to create the permanent from the temporary. The secondary purpose of this project was to give me a space to explore the abstract and embrace the latter into my design process. The project’s name, Éphémère, is French for ‘ephemeral’.

Research

I researched a wide array of things surrounding ephemerality and design: ephemeral nature-based art, Buddhist sand mandalas, one-use self-destructing designs, festival sites, attempts at creating designs that beat ephemerality and will still be understood in thousands of years, and designs that use something ephemeral as their base or main resource. One of the things from which I drew the most inspiration was a project involving the creation of an alphabet using photographs of water reflections. 

The Shapes

Once I’d completed my research, I then set about generating a plethora of shapes. As previously mentioned, I dropped fluorescent ink into a clear container of water. I filmed the entire process, doing roughly 15 ink drops in total. From that footage, I pulled different stills and image-traced them in Illustrator. From those tracings I was able to gather a large library of unique shapes. 

The Book

The shapes were very abstract, so collages seemed like an appropriate way to use and display them while still maintaining their abstract quality. The book format was chosen in order to selectively pace the display of the collages. The book’s layout is clean and simple to allow the collages to be the main focus. Some collages are sprawled across an entire spread, while some are constrained to one page. The latter are juxtaposed with a singular shape on the opposing page, labeled as a figure. Throughout each colour chapter, these show all of the shapes used to make that chapter’s collages. Text is minimal in this book so the shapes can speak for themselves; the shapes are also used as chapter markers in both the section openers and in the running head.