Kuba Wojtaszczyk books

TL;DR: Taking care of visual side of three books of an upcoming author.

Book one: “Portret trumienny”1

I met Kuba Wojtaszczyk before he was hip. After few years, knowing I do graphic design, he asked me to help with his first book “Portret trumienny”. Originally I was commissioned for few illustrations, but I ended up creating the cover, designing and preparing the whole book for print and virtually the entire visual stuff related to the book. The novel was self-published in small quantity.

Color-wise I wanted to juxtapose the traditional coffin portrait with a very non-rural and non-Polish color with a cultural/artistic character – a persian green. Additionally I went with two complementary colors.

After reading the text I had a long list of ideas – I decided to go with seven of them, but after some thinking with Kuba, we rejected one, too controversial concept. For a clearer overview we added a non-architectural plan of the house at the end of the book.

The main inspiration for me was the visual legacy of the Catholic Church and a provincial design rooted in the PRL.

The fonts in the book are Chaparral Pro from Carol Twombly and Halis Rounded from Ahmet Altun. Due to a small size, the text is placed within a relatively simple grid with chapters beginning on new pages, subsections separated by •s and blank backs for illustrations.

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Book two: “Kiedy zdarza się przemoc, lubię patrzeć”2

Second book.

Book three: “Dlaczego nikt nie wspomina psów z Titanica?”3

A third novel of Kuba Wojtaszczyk.

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  1. “Portret trumienny” (“coffin portrait”), is a realistic portrait of the dead person put on coffins for the funeral. It was a popular thing to do for nobles (“szlachta”) of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during 17th and 18th centuries. ↩

  2. “When violence happens, I like to look”. ↩

  3. “Why nobody recollects the dogs from the Titanic?” ↩

Go deeper: Human Parts or Mad Skeleton