Intentions
This publication was edited, designed and illustrated by OGL, using a text extracted from an essay a friend had written in 2015 on the anthropology of time. All aspects of the design of the book were intended to push readers to reflect on various tangled aspects of temporality and history.
Execution
Each page of writing features exactly the number of words the average reader can read in a minute, with a timeline at the side of the text to show how many seconds should have elapsed from beginning reading the book. A python script was written to process the ragged text, and calculate the number of seconds that elapsed on each line based on the number of words on each, and output the total progress down the page in seconds. Two contrasting Garamonds were used to foreground notions of design history juxtaposed against current design aesthetics, tools and methodologies, and Letter Gothic was used to provide a mechanical counterpoint for setting all the temporal page matter. The second section of the book presents individual frames of an exploding globe, rendered in Cinema 4D. This can be seen as a reference to the origin of time at the Big Bang, and also functions as a manifestation of the fracturing of notions of time that is a key subject of the text.