Description:

Dominic Hoey is a poet, author and playwright based in Auckland who’s writing and performing has been shaped by accessibility. He’s always resisted the idea that poetry should be a puzzle you need a 50k education to unlock.

This book is a series of poems he mostly wrote during lockdown. Many of them he shared on Instagram as a way to stay vaguely sane. During this time his best friend died and he fell in love. This work Ranges from imaginative scenes of an out-of-pocket youth, to forthright and vigorous critique of late-stage capitalism. Early on Dominic knew he wanted this to be the kind of poetry collection anyone could pick up and be drawn into immediately.

While tutoring at Wintec School of Media Arts I started questioning how to explain how to break a grid? Are there rules to breaking rules? and ultimately can consistency be boring?

A system was developed to give the book structure and to ensure it still made sense to the reader. A modular grid was used with a heading style and page number so the reader always knew where a poem began and ended. Black was the only colour and the main typeface was a Grotesk sans in 3 different sizes. Each poem was set in this base style and then treated individually so they each had their own sense of identity. Playing with size, tension, and placement on the grid, other typefaces were introduced—a chunky condensed for anything political, a serif for words of grief or love.

Another layer to the design was interpreting Dominic's performance style through size, tension, and placement on grid. I also used tabs, line breaks, and page breaks to encourage the reader to read at a different pace and rhythm.

Words are broken up across a line to slow down the pace or tightly packed into a corner giving certain words more importance, poems about grief and love are spread out over multiple pages giving single sentences a sense of weight and importance. A section was flipped to read landscape, text spiraled like its words and they framed a page or filled it.

This work is elevated by it’s simplicity and unexpectedness—it’s imperfect, accessible and experimental. Its creators—a dyslexic and grieving writer paired with a designer working full time, on the edge of burnout finishing a personal project with undiagnosed ADHD. We still pulled it off.

Unlike common literature books it is bold, quiet, loud, soft, and a little bit bonkers, this design aesthetic challenges the elitism of literature making it appealing and accessible to everyone.