Needs:
They are a French organization publishing a series of socio-political studies on South East Asia.
They were looking for an overall visual identity for their next series of studies on different
political and economical issues of South East Asia. They often used real-life photographs of
objects from the region being written about, which failed to give any idea about the exact
cartographical location to the global readers. They also needed an identity that stood out from
conventional covers using photographs.
Challenges:
How do we draw the global readers' attention to the geo-political location without necessarily
relying on a photographic feel?
Solutions:
We used real maps of the specific regions as the background (a thematic peg for the series),
symbolically represented piracy and high-rise buildings (the content of the first two books of
the series), and gave the cover a striking hand-drawn look.
As a different version of cover for the book on housing policies of Singapore, we used the
conventional idea of a metropolitan skyline with high-rises, tweaking it substantially it by
imparting a hand-drawn texture suggesting the thickness and solidity of built form.
IRASEC Studies on SE Asia : Book Design
