On her death, Carlene leaves the painting of Erzulie to Kiki. This gesture, between characters who have only recently connected via a sense of shared emotional values, is in direct contrast to the Kipps family’s own mercenary appreciation of the painting.
With this in mind, I set out to create a contemporary version of the Erzulie image, substituting ‘dime store’ price labels for flowers, raising questions about what it is that we truly value in life.
‘On Beauty’ is a complex read exploring a number of themes as it unwinds. This design features characters, loosely reminiscent of those in the book, who wear ‘dime store’ or corner-shop labels symbolic of the labels that we take on through life but also alluding to the value that we attach to each other. Zadie Smith appears to test the authenticity of such values just as the figures here contemplate the larger framed labels.
The book also deals with how values are affected by age, gender, status, culture and aspiration. The characters here, therefore, reside on different strata within the design, connecting on some levels but not on others. One character appears within a frame suggestive of a kind of abstract intellectual existence that doesn’t quite connect with real life or emotion.
A conceptually rich book, I wanted the colour scheme to reflect this.
‘On Beauty’ deals with, amongst other issues, how values are affected by age, gender, status, culture and aspiration. Zadie Smith makes reference to trees at different points within the story, comparing those in the fall of New England with those of London. This design takes the tree as a metaphor for the cycles and passage of time. Leaves, items of beauty in themselves, have been replaced with ‘dime store’ price labels, raising questions about how time and experience affect our values. The image suggests that some characters appear to endure this process better than others.
While I'm reasonably pleased with the designs, especially some of the colour combinations, I think that the end results could be better in a number of ways. The layout reveals the extent of my skill and understanding in terms of typography - I would like to develop it to be more dynamic and innovative. The designs are a little lazy in that I believe they rely quite heavily on acquired elements and development on the fly. In my eyes they would benefit from a greater depth of preparatory work, allowing them to become fresher and to demonstrate greater fidelity to the initial design concept.
