The world is a stage

  • Design can talk for you,
    but can it act, dance or sing?

    Where would the world be without drama, the conflict and resolution repeated in story song and stage.
    Telling a story is just as much about what is unsaid as said, what is hidden and what is revealed. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes it is more. Telling a story, or hinting at it can be a delicate thing. Say to much and you lose the mystery, the allure—say too little and there is confusion or ambivalence.

    This postcard series was to run as a consecutive series of direct mail reminders to promote the play “The Lower Depths”, a Russian play from 1901 addressing the social turmoil around power changing hands and the consequences on the common man, a theme often repeated generation after generation in country after country. Kurosawa works with the same concept in many of his masterpieces. The postcards strive to capture the constructivist aesthetic, while as a sequence, demonstrating the entropy inherent in social constructs. An accompanying poster was also created as an infographic summary of each of the cards and relate it to the play as a conceptual matchmaker.

    In short, the design wants to dance and sing and jump and ultimately crash as a reflection of the play.
  • Photographs of folded paper provide the backgrounds
  • The first card in the series holds the closest to the constructivist model
  • The second card still references constructivist style, with the addition of unstable elements.
  • The final card leaves the earlier tradition in shambles, mirroring the arc of the play's plot.
  • The two color backside is shared by the three faces, a two color type treatment evoking both the motion and mood of the facing sides.
  • A small infographic poster was created as the project summary. Encapsulating the play, and establishing the design criteria at the bottom, it correlates those givens to the proposed postcards.