This project involved designing a book cover and page layout that would best represent the artistic social experiment held on the subreddit Place.
r/Place is an experiment (held on reddit) that was created on April 1, 2017 where users had the opportunity to place one pixel of colour every five minutes on a digital canvas consisting of five hundred million pixels. The experiment lasted for four days, but was recently brought back on April 1, 2022. On each occasion, what started off as a blank canvas eventually turned into an array of different artworks. So the main challenge of this project was to find a way to bring something digital into a physical format.
So how would one tackle this? The concept chosen for the cover was to focus on the transformation from blank canvas to artwork. The technique that did a good job at representing this transformation was using a lenticular image. What I didn't anticipate was that finding a place to do this would be a challenge on its own. Luckily, I was able to find small artists on Etsy and work with them to create a cover that was not only eye catching but on theme for the subject.
For the layout, an organized text was chosen with titles and colours that reflected the tone most commonly found on reddit. Finally, for the title I chose “Collaborative chaos” to point to the fact that to produce any cohesive image on r/Place, collaboration was key but that the overall nature of r/place is inherently chaotic.
