NORSE MYTHOLOGY SERIES (2020)

My Final Major Project focuses on the representation of historical visuals in publishing, by re-imaging the vibrant, visual culture of Norse storytelling for a twenty-first century audience. While these amazing stories have been told and retold across countless generations, in modern published editions generic images are perhaps too often used to accompany the texts. It seems the visuals the Nordic community created to represent their stories have almost been lost to our society. 

In response, I have created a new three-part ‘Norse Mythology’ book series, re-designing the visuals to better represent the richness of the Norse visual for a modern audience.​​​​​​​ I was commended for this project for the Cambridge University Press Award for Editorial Design. 

The aim of my project was to find a graphic language best used to represent the Norse mythology, instead of recreating the visuals in my own style, like has been done many times before, instead I found a graphic style that can be used to replicate the Nordic visuals as authentically as possible, giving the readers a much more honest view of the culture of the Nordic society. The graphic style I chose was digital line art. It’s a style that has become widely popular in todays society, and it allowed me to replicate each Nordic pattern and pictorial image as close to the originals as possible.

The colours of my books were inspired by using the ‘Viking’ colour palette from the National Museum of Denmark, allowing me to represent the Nordic colours as authentically as possible. But using a minimal, colour palette of two contrasting colours, keeps them contemporary and bold. 

In terms of the design of the books, the consistency of them makes them functional for readers and production and allows them to follow the stories and visuals easily. That was also the purpose of the footnotes in the text, it allows the reader to get definitions straight away instead of having to flip back and forth between the pages, so its more practical.

I created a personalised typeface for the book series, was the best option for the design. A normal condensed, sans serif, wouldn’t have given the best representation of the Nordic runes and the contemporary runic typefaces available were a little cliché. But taking the main elements of the runes and adding them to a condensed, sans serif, gives a much more minimal, contemporary finish, and gives a better balance between representing the runic language and keeping it for a 21st Century audience.