Books

Citywide Poets 2008 : City Breaths


The latest CityWide Poets book cover, City Breaths is done! I struggled with this one for a little while. At first, the formless nature of breath led to designs that looked too much like literal smoke, which I knew was not going to fly. I searched and sketched for different ways to represent vaporous things, tucking those away as I went.

I kept pressing the question, What is 'city' breath, and what would it look like, anyway? How would it be different from anything else? That also seemed like a dead end of urban environments, gritty and strong, but sometimes unsettling. And sometimes too much like a hip-hop album.

Then I thought, Wouldn't city breath be... fresh?. I suppose it dates me a little bit (the horror!) but I felt I could make that work. I started with Andes mints, remembering the iconic mountainside that they use. I would replace the mountain with a cityscape. When I tried photographing the mints, there was something underwhelming about them, and the outline of the city on the mint I didn't think would work.

Taking a break I found an old Altoids tin, instead of the "old timey" design, it had the strongman on it, and the type was set in Myriad and a Slab Serif. That's when I got the idea here, I photographed the tin and photoshopped the cityscape and spirals representing breath, making the solid connection with the mints such that it didn't come across as smoke.

The spirals carry throughout the book, and thankfully I was able to get full-page photographs of a number of the Citywide Poets, just like with ZerO Gravity.

I think the result it successful, pairing the tongue-in-cheek humor of "fresh breath" with "fresh words" and stealing a bit from Altoids "Curiously Strong" campaign that just about everyone can relate to.

The type is Myriad, with a slight modification to have the "r" reaching for the "y".