Construction manual for earthquake resistant houses built of earth
In 2005 I was approached by the Austrian association 'X-Change Culture-Science' to design a booklet for an essay about construction methods for earthquake resistant houses. ¶ The particular challenge of brief and material were the combination of English and Farsi texts with images and accompanying captions. Whereas English reads left to right, Farsi goes the other way round. Commonly books which deal with large runs of texts in opposing reading-directions assign two beginnings, one for each script. With this approach the reader basically gets two books, stuck together on the back. In many cases this works fine, however, in this particular project, text and images were inseparably entwined. And apparently, neither client nor designer were inclined to duplicate all images for both languages. Therefore we came up with a different solution: Both languages started at the same page, but where rotated by 180°. Like this we were able to have both texts referring to the same image. These images, in turn, were rotated by 90° to give readers of both scripts the same usability. ¶ No doubt, this requires some rotating, nevertheless, it seemed to be the best solution to the particular questions we were trying to solve.
In 2005 I was approached by the Austrian association 'X-Change Culture-Science' to design a booklet for an essay about construction methods for earthquake resistant houses. ¶ The particular challenge of brief and material were the combination of English and Farsi texts with images and accompanying captions. Whereas English reads left to right, Farsi goes the other way round. Commonly books which deal with large runs of texts in opposing reading-directions assign two beginnings, one for each script. With this approach the reader basically gets two books, stuck together on the back. In many cases this works fine, however, in this particular project, text and images were inseparably entwined. And apparently, neither client nor designer were inclined to duplicate all images for both languages. Therefore we came up with a different solution: Both languages started at the same page, but where rotated by 180°. Like this we were able to have both texts referring to the same image. These images, in turn, were rotated by 90° to give readers of both scripts the same usability. ¶ No doubt, this requires some rotating, nevertheless, it seemed to be the best solution to the particular questions we were trying to solve.
typical spread
cover