Description:

Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness was a relatively scathing critique of Australia’s suburban landscape, lightly illustrated to great effect. After The Australian Ugliness brought together a range of critical and creative authors responding to this text. The newer publication was to be much more heavily illustrated; however, I still wanted the format to be small enough to throw in a backpack, or read on the tram. I chose relatively rudimentary fonts (Union and Times), as I did not want them to emulate too much personality or signify a particular era. I selected an unexpected colour palette of purple and navy blue, while somewhat mid-century you could claim, certainly not ‘Australian’. I think the most important decision from a design perspective was to avoid the tropes that could have been so easily fallen into, and let the text and imagery do the heavy lifting.