Project

A few years ago, an academic experiment began to conduct a multi-disciplinary collaboration between faculty and students in the Art & Design Department at Utah Valley University. Our end goal has been to create a fine art coffee table book that showcases the creativity, innovation, and ingenuity of our department. It is a carefully orchestrated performance for visual artists. A year is spent on each book project researching, traveling, creating, designing, and editing. Grimm Gestalt is our fifth publication with all proceeds from book sales directly funding the publication of future engaged learning experiences for our department. The book is 184 pages long and available in both hardcover and softcover.
We tasked printmakers, painters, illustrators, sculptors, and photographers to create work inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Art historians researched and wrote about the Brothers Grimm. Within each of these artistic genres, the variety in approach was as stark and diverse as the stories themselves. Imagery ranged from playful to disturbing and from literal to poetic. The artists involved were encouraged to explore and play to each of their own strengths and creative processes.
The graphic design team was then charged with taking a varied collection of stories and curating a diversified collection from over 2,500 pieces of art and combining them into a new cohesive whole. The designers created six unique styles that were intermittently repeated. Individual stories were imbued with unique personalities. Each one has a distinctive flair in color, typeface, and feel. No story is preceded or followed by the same style. The fonts range from classical to bizarre much like the stories themselves. Playing off of the notion of gestalt, the creative synergy was revealed in unexpected ways, the whole is truly more than the sum of its parts.

School

Team