The Library of Congress National Book Festival 2019 has been revealed, and it’s a stunning feast of geometry around an open book.
Marian Bantjes is a designer, illustrator, typographer and writer and this poster for the one-day festival on August 31 shows all those skills in action.
The Library of Congress blog quotes Bantjes as saying,
I look for structure in any given project. For this, I started with the open book, on edge, with its pages radiating outward. I wanted something very sunny and bright, and so I built the structure further from these radiating lines with the idea of having words flowing out of the book. The book opens to a half-circle so I used this circle to form other parts of the structure, and divided the whole area up into sections based on this. I then developed a series of patterns used on the cupid-bow shape of an open book, and finally built some little flying books to accentuate the patterns and add a playful exuberance to the poster. The whole is a celebration and a joy.
While it’s not going to win my award for book fair art of the year, it is a poster that, the more you study it, the more you see.
It will be worth downloading the PDF to see this poster in detail.
