Category: Book Design

Tales from the Dark Side of the City

Tales from the Dark Side of the City

A six-book box set for the Unknown Fields division of London's Architectural Association

Client: Architectural Association

The series of 6 books edited by Liam Young and Kate Davies (Unknown Fields) includes stories developed from expeditions through Bolivia and the Atacama Desert, the Western Australian Outback, the South China Sea and Inner Mongolia, the gemfields of Madagascar, Far North Alaska and the black sites of the United States.

Spread with a photo of a grassland landscape with grid reference an typography
Spread with typography over a photo of an open cast mine

Unknown Fields is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions into the shadows cast by the contemporary city, to uncover the industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness its technology and culture set in motion.

An open box containing 6 individual books
Spread showing illustrations overlapped with statistics and a photo of men in an open mine
Spread with images of men on the deck of a cargo ship with statistics and illustrations
Spread showing data overlapped with a climate change statistic
Spread showing a data centre in the arctic with grid references
A spread showing a distorted photo, grid references and typography
Spread showing a photo of a desert plain and typography

Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a book series that forms an atlas to the territories and stories of a city that stretches across the entire planet, a city that sits between documentary and fiction, a city of dislocated sites, of drone footage and hidden-camera investigations, of interviews and speculative narratives, of toxic objects and distributed matter from distant grounds. They are a collection of tales from the constellation of elsewheres that are conjured into being by the city’s wants and needs, fears and dreams.

Spread showing illustrations of aircraft, typography and redacted reports
Where the City Can’t See

Where the City Can’t See

A 400 page book of pure data

Client: Liam Young

Where the City Can’t See is the first fiction film shot entirely through laser scanning technology, directed by artist Liam Young and written by author Tim Maughan. Smith & Lewarne were commissioned to create a print edition of the data from the film.

Where the City Can't See, a book of pure data treated typographically and illustratively

Set in the Chinese owned and controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ), in a not-too-distant future where Google maps, urban management systems and CCTV surveillance are not only mapping our cities, but ruling them.

Where the City Can't See, a book of pure data treated typographically and illustratively
Where the City Can't See, a book of pure data treated typographically and illustratively
Where the City Can't See, a book of pure data treated typographically and illustratively

An edition of 5 limited edition 400pp books were produced to coincide with the release of the film by using the entire text file derived directly from the laser scanning technology text file.

Where the City Can't See, a book of pure data treated typographically and illustratively
Where the City Can't See, a book of pure data treated typographically and illustratively

The design mimicked the approach to the film by rescanning, pulling apart and resizing complete sections of the page so that it could be read a visual journey in it's own right from light to dark.