This is a concept design for a 24-page writers festival program.

I took design inspiration from zines, woven paper, print overlays & analogue processes.The imagery used throughout is all sourced from the Public Domain Review, but edited and merged to create something new from something old. I wanted the cover to represent layers of human history, overlaid on top of each other to create a mosaic – inspired by TRAFFiC’s mission to display how the past informs the future. The ‘old’ layer is images of castles and European Imperialism, jarringly and unnaturally sitting atop a wild landscape.

The middle layer is symbols of industrial ‘progress’, including a photograph of an early locomotive, a microscope slide of a dissected fly wing, zebras and elephants in a Canadian circus in 1920, etc.

The top layer is the ‘future’: images of the natural world and symbols of Indigenous cultures taking over again, slowly breaking up the background imagery to reveal something pure and squeaky-clean underneath. The old, archaic world is floating away like embers or dust in a circular motif continued throughout the rest of the program.