Communication Design School of Design
Lewis Lenoble
I am a prolific multidisciplinary designer with a focus on book design, poster design, typography, and image-making. My practice draws on my wide field of interest, which ranges from Interbellum poetry, to baseball, to the history of trade printing, to American folk music and beyond. This translates into an analytical, detail-oriented, and studied approach to design.
Originally an illustrator and comics artist, I quickly took up to typography, valuing carefully-considered and subject-informed design choices. My design is in the service of an authentic connection, a feeling of excitement and tactile warmth, ranging from refined restraint to avant-garde playfulness wherever needed.
My productions in final year have included typographic installations, letterpressed posters and cards, type design, prop-making, book design, and bookbinding, among others. I also maintain a number of personal side projects, including a graphic novel and various commissions in collaboration with local musicians. Additionally, I was shortlisted for the ongoing Penguin Book Cover Design Award.
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Everyone is Keeping Score
Inspired by my love for baseball, this book seeks to illustrate and communicate the intellectual and poetic aspects of the sport by taking them out of context through the use of an elevated visual language in the goal of encouragin the viewer to engage with these concepts on a more neutral ground, with less of the disdain for sports often found in the arts. These visual compositions, which are inspired by mid-century Swiss design, American modernism, and Avant-Garde soviet page design, are paired up with excerpts from a variety of literary sources, including scholarly essays, plays, and memoirs. Featuring a foldover spread, a die-cut cover with flaps, double coloured endpapers and a swiss case binding on top of a kettle-stitched book block, the book is set on a grid defined by numbers that recur in baseball’s rulebook.
Once Upon A Time In the South
Commissioned by two local folk musicians for a popular weekly open mic night, this poster celebrates wood type’s role as a signifier of Americana, as well as the simple beauty of turn-of-the-century paper ephemera. The type is decorated by hand with details inspired by mid-century westernwear. All rules, typographical decorations, and type were letterpress-printed or else gleaned from historical specimens or digitised wood typefaces and adapted for purpose.
Penguin Book Cover Award
This book cover, which is shortlisted for the Penguin Book Cover Design Award, combines a simple, striking visual with faithful 70’s aesthetics and a researched interest in communicating the basic plot of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s book. The torn concert ticket represents the plot-defining breakup of the titular band, and its design is inspired by tickets which were issued at the time by the real-life venue where the fictional group play their last show. On the back cover, fake newspaper clippings allude to themes of fame, gossip, and exposure. The earthy orange colour, a 70’s staple, attracts the eye. Purposeful imperfections in the typesetting and period accurate fonts ensure an authentic, trade-printing feel.
Letterpress Projects
A series of letterpress prints based on the poetry of Edwin Morgan: the last verse from his poem The Unspoken, featuring black on black printing; a Christmas card based on Trio, using holly metal type ornaments; and a large poster using colour, size, and superposition to evoke the spirit of this line from his poem Pelagius.
Thames and Hudson Book Design Competition
My entry for Thames & Hudson’s Book Design Contest. I picked Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Greece and Rome: A Guide to the Classical Pantheon. Plotted on the proportions of Greek temples and the Golden Ratio, using a limited scale of the Arno typeface, carefully chosen for its small caps, Renaissance italics and Trajanesque proportions, this design rests on elegant typesetting and a running header of laurel leaves inspired by Jost Hochuli. The contest is still ongoing.
SORRY
Originally constructed with thirty A3 sheets of paper, this giant apology was a huge success in the most travelled hallway of the School of Design, taking on a life of its own. With the subject and object of the apology left up to interpretation, the mural could become personal to the viewer. It could invoke the enormity of transgression. The scale would almost force interaction. Later in the year, SORRY as turned into a projection, with the final iteration being set onto the protective husk of the famously burnt-out Mackintosh building, adding a new layer of meaning to the work.
Auden Sans
A typeface designed to set my Degree Show project, a typographic installation of a line from W. H. Auden’s long poem, In Time of War. Based on an incomplete “lost” wood type found in the GSA Caseroom collection, this typeface is also inspired by Franklin Gothic Condensed, a hallmark of classic large-scale advertising and print design, which I have great affection for.
