Performance & Anarchy
book, newspaper, & animation design
December 2021
The book designed in this project includes “The World of Wrestling” by Roland Barthes, “Baclavas & Putin” by Anna Baranchuk, and “The Resistance: An Anarchists insight on Alex Pina’s Money Heist” by Anandita Pagnis. Each of these texts are placed next to each other to show the depiction of performance and anarchy in modern media and politics.
Each text is represented by a color and an icon. “The World of Wrestling” is represented by a yellow eye of a luchador mask; “Baclavas & Putin” a purple mask reminiscent of the masks worn by “Pussy Riot”, a Russian activist group; and “The Resistance” is show with a simplified pink Salvador Dali mask worn in the Netflix show “Money Heist”.
As an experimental piece of typesetting and building a visual vocabulary for a long-form print design, this piece gives a foundation to passionate design skills. The Warnock Pro family gave a wide variety of options to keep a consistent font palette. Captions and supporting text is set in Alegreya Sans, a sans serif quiet enough to support Warnock Pro while having the elegance of a thin weight and expressive quality in the descenders.
The circles in the data analysis to the left represent the occurrences of bold, colored words throughout the book and where each of them land. Each color highlights to the theme of each essay.In “World of Wrestling”, the word “mask” is highlighted in yellow. In “Balaclavas & Putin” we see “power”, “protest” and “carnivalesque” highlighted. And finally; in “The Resistance”, we have “anarchy” highlighted. With the representation above, we see that the themes in “Balaclavas & Putin” are most prominent throughout the three essays, proving the authority that power and protest has over systems like the Russian government and performances like wrestling and a popular Netflix series.
