Staging a book

The last example of a concept for the yearbook of the Theater Basel, which I want to document within this blog, was created by Yara Greuter and Meret Küng. Both are also in the third year of studies at the Academy of Art and Design in Basel. To intersperse the publication with an additional layer of content, which lets the user gain another insight into the processes within the theater, they placed the focus of their concept on the stage manager. The entire book is not numbered by pages, but by time specifications like a timeline, which describes an entire evening at the theater – minute by minute. The reader isn't experiencing this period directly, but only by the announcements of the stage manager, which usually remain hidden from the theatergoer. The short and sometimes apparently cryptic information, which is visually separated by the direction of reading and its typographic design, shows the theater as a complex apparatus in which a kind of brain overlooks all operations and regulates them.

Yara and Meret chose colored paper for their realization. In addition to the neutral white one the used a pale pink, blue and green, as an alleviated reference to the color coding for the three divisions opera, drama and ballet. The paper becomes an aid to orientation within the book.

With this insight into another selected work of the typography class of the Academy of Art and Design Basel this series on the yearbook of the Theater Basel comes to its end. At this point, I still would like to express the hope that Mr Delnon, director of the Theater Basel, is aware of the great potential hidden in these concepts and will seriously take them into consideration for future realizations of the yearbook.