r/PLACE
BOOK DESIGN — 2023
Role
Designer
Tools
InDesign
Duration
2 Months
This project involved designing and producing a book cover and page layout that would best represent the artistic social experiment hosted on the subreddit r/Place.
r/Place is an experiment created on April 1, 2017, where users had the opportunity to place one pixel of color every five minutes on a digital canvas consisting of 500 million pixels. The experiment lasted for four days but was revived on April 1, 2022, and July 20, 2023. On each occasion, what began as a blank canvas eventually transformed into a diverse array of artworks.
Left Image— Logo of the original 2017 experiment
Right Image— Logo of the 2022 and 2023 experiments
Images sourced from Wikipedia.
GOALS & CHALLENGES
The main challenge of this project was creating a cover that transformed something digital and constantly evolving into a physical, "static" format.
Left Image— Final Canvas in 2017
Right Image— Final Canvas in 2022
Images sourced from Reddit r/Place
PROCESS
The direction I chose to take for the cover was to focus on the transformation from blank canvas to artwork. The technique I found that did a good job at representing this transformation was using a lenticular image.
In my search for a place to create a custom lenticular image, I turned to Etsy, where I found a shop owner who made lenticular images in sizes that were suitable for this project. Since there were limited size options, I had to have the image created first before I could proceed with determining the dimensions of the book.
Once the image was created and the book dimensions were finalized, I was able to move on to the page layout. I chose to keep a fairly standard layout for the pages, with small elements that were reminiscent of digital spaces added here and there. Using a colour palette that mirrored Reddit’s.
Finally, after brainstorming the title for a while, I settled on "Collaborative Chaos." I thought it perfectly encapsulated the idea of the r/place experiment, as collaboration through communities was essential for creating any cohesive image on the canvas. However, when stepping back and looking at it as a whole, the nature of the experiment is inherently chaotic.
The r/Place cover captures the constant movement, that was the experiment, by using a lenticular image that flips between a section of the finished canvas and the logo on a white background.
The book binding was done by Keenan Poloncsak.
Website: LE RELIEUR DES FAUBOURGS
ANGELA'S TAKEAWAYS
This project is still one of my favorites to date. Admittedly, at the beginning, it felt like a daunting task, as I had no idea where to even start. However, once I began researching different concept possibilities and exploring where I could take the project, my initial nervousness turned into excitement.