Within this project I took the original text of band the Mars Volta's Deloused in the Comatorium and reinterpreted it within the format of a bound book.
I found the original, viewable here, to be hard to read and understand. The subject matter is cryptic enough without having the physical difficulty of reading long lines with little spacing.
I decided that I wanted to lay out the book in a way that allowed the reader to have some breathing space but still retain elements that related to the text. The solution was to apply different, non-standard and asymmetric layouts on each page using various typographic elements to emphasise sections of text.
Editing and correcting the book took a week to accomplish where I listened to nothing but the album of music that accompanies the text, this allowed me to be completely absorbed into the world portrayed in the book. The physical layout took much longer as each page adhered to a different grid and due to constraints of font size each page only contains a very small portion of the whole, the book contains 94 pages.
When choosing materials for the final version, I knew that I wanted to keep it simple so as not to distract from the story itself. I chose red as the main colour to complement the cream paper stock with a poppy print, which related to themes within the book, on the inside cover.
The cover image is stamped with a bespoke rubber stamp created for the project which, again, relates to sections within the book. To finish the project I created a cd slipcase including a pdf of my manuscript and the album of music which was hidden within the pocket folds of the book for intrepid readers to discover.
