It started with a 3am taxi ride on the western express highway, Mumbai, when I spotted a massive truck carrying a helicopter completely wrapped in BLUE TARPAULIN. Tarp was always part of the cityscape but I never noticed the excessive use of it… until this helicopter incident. Post that, all I could see is blue. And it led to BLUED.
BLUED book is designed by Berlin based graphic designer : Julia Vogel
Julia Vogel about the book design process:
When we designed BLUED, we thought about how blue tarp is used in India and whats so characteristic about it. It´s an allround material, used for everything as a quick and easy solution to protect your belongings from dirt and water mainly. Since its not customized, it actually never fits properly. Blue tarp is huge and its bulky and you need cord to fix it. In the end it works “somehow”. So, this feeling of imperfection we wanted to add to the book. We chose a quite big size to refer to the tarp size, and also to make it a little unhandy. The book jacket doesnt fit. Its too small to protect the book and you can get a glimpse of the content already. In order to give the book a bit of an improvised and raw feeling, we left the blue yarn visible, to show how the book is constructed. The rather rough paper also refers to this crudeness. The fully blue printed spread inside of course refers to the most obvious feature of blue tarp: its blue surface.
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BDD team: Zeenat Kulavoor, Aditi Damle & Sameer Kulavoor.
Screenprinted by Venkatesh, Chepuri Arts.
Papers by SUN.
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