The Journey into Color
The Giracolore is a spin-art machine pertaining to the new popular tradition of Italian toys:
Raffaele Cesano, the Giracolore’s creator, asked me to make a book with its history and practical uses.
“The Journey into Color” (Il viaggio nel colore) is now the first book I have fully designed, and perhaps even my biggest design work yet. Its copies now come with every device put on sale.
The client
Raffaele is a schoolteacher-turned-toymaker. He’s especially good at crafting traditional toys and games, like spinning tops, smol carousels, and wooden acrobats. He is fascinated with color in motion.
Process
Raffaele first gave me a bunch of material: pictures, informational texts, and stories. Some things would be repeated across four different texts, but each one would have something useful of its own. I read them all and then wove them into a fluent narrative. Every now and then, I would meet Raffaele to refine the text together. I also took some disc pics myself.
I learned a lot about book design while working on this. For example:
- The placement of punctuation and line breaks affects legibility. A line break at the wrong syllable can make a word appear to be a different one.
- Consistency in punctuation colors and weights is a science of its own!
Outcome
I chose a 13×18 cm format for the book so it would fit perfectly into the Giracolore’s 13.5×19 cm box. Nothing is arbitrary here: the disc on the cover is the size of a real one. I made sure each spread had at least some color.
The imprint page and its adjacent table of contents are stunning: the gradient title, the rare NB ligature, the Italian cockade (which looks like a Giracolore disc!), the frame…
The book begins with a short introduction to the Giracolore and proceeds with spin-art’s history. Notice the alignment of the words “bellezza” on the left page:
The book then delves into color psychology:
And culminates with stories metaphorically illustrated with the Giracolore. Here’s one of them, The Little Blonde Girl, with the parallelism principle at work:
Some pages encourage to make one’s own disc and glue it in:
The book ends with an invitation to take a look at Raffaele’s other projects and to contact him:
The book is set in three styles of Apfel Grotesk: Regular, Fett, and Brukt (for the “stick your disc here” label).
Conclusion
The book is the best introduction to the Giracolore, vividly showing the device’s value for children, teachers, artists, storytellers, and therapists.
Good design is never boring.
The client’s review
Robert has visually arranged The Journey into Color with great success and has helped me introduce it to the public.
Robert has various qualities: his youthful energy gave me confidence to express what I felt. I had fun letting him do his thing, letting him express and interpret my ideas. Everyone has the right to play the game they enjoy the most.
The result is what I wanted.
I initially hesitated to pay in advance, but during the course of the work, I saw Robert’s reliability firsthand.
Enjoy the colors!
