Creative Agency: Estúdio Guayabo
Designers Daniel Bilac, Valquíria Rabelo
Visual Artist: Rachel Leão
Printer: Alessandro Lima
Project Type: Produced, Commercial Work
Client: Jovino Machado
Location: Brasil
Packaging Contents: Poetry book
Packaging Substrate / Materials: Paper
Printing Process: Wood engraving
Cantigas de Amor & Maldizer (or Songs of Love & Cursing) is a poetry book by Jovino Machado – a Brazilian poet who has been publishing his work since the 1980’s. The texts are about the excitement of love and the injuries of breaking up. Intending to be a collector’s edition, there were printed only fifty copies, each one signed and numbered by the author.
With just 4 x 5 inches, the book is delivered for the reader sealed with a striped sticker stamp and fastened by a cyan twine. In the dust jacket, there is a red woodcut of the artist Rachel Leão, printed by the engraver Alessandro Lima especially for this edition. However, in the inside, the reader can find a emerald green cover and, along the book pages, some delicate botanic drawings and scientific illustrations of beetles. The contrasting pallet and the different kinds of images follow the main concept of the project: the duality, present both in the title and in the poems.
What’s Unique?
The wood engraving, handcrafted and printed in each one of the dust jackets, is what make this design special. This solution was only possible trough an interdisciplinary process, evolving a team of designers, engravers and visual artists.