Inside Out

The second concept for the yearbook 09/10 of the Theater Basel I want to present was designed by my fellow students Julia Kaltenbach and Thomas Lehner (who both still don't have a website I could link to). Their idea was to turn the theater inside out. The same way they dealed with the concept of the yearbook. They created a real hard cover book but splitted its body and manipulated its spine in a way that the book can be turned inside out itself, too. So if you open the book, you see two innerbooks: one for the preview of the next season and one containing the service informations.

To highlight the main aspect of their formal concept, they kept the typographic design inside the book very classical. Formally they oriented themselves by classic novel books of the last two centuries. The fonts (Brauer Basel, an edited version of Brauer and Adobe Garamond) were the only aspect of the existing corporate design of the theater they sticked to. The DVD which had to be integrated into the book is placed in a blanked out part of the binder. Julia and Thomas want the book to be handed out with the innerbooks turned outside. So the DVD is hidden in the middle. The turned around binder is kept closed by magnets hidden under the cloth binding.

Besides the given content of the yearbook they interspersed the book with short statements which were given by visitors of the Theater Basel. Julia and Thomas asked them for the reason why they go to the theater. They used different positions and sizes and also cutted the statements on some pages to produce a situation comparable to a walk through the atrium of the theater building where you hear snatch of talk while you are heading for the auditorium. The nearer you get to the descriptions of the next season's plays the less statements there are. The moment you reach it, all the voices are gone – like the abrupt silence at the beginning of a show.

They really worked out a very impressive solution by taking the classic model of a book as we know it and breaking with it by making several sophisticated changes.