Sie sind ja wahnsinnig!
Editorial
Screenprint
2023 – 2024
A Book for the Generation of his Children
Axel Wandtke's "Sie sind ja wahnsinnig!" is an account of his time as an 18-year-old in the National People's Army of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It delivers humorous punchlines while simultaneously getting under your skin. Based on the manuscript, we developed a typographic design and layout concept.
Typographic Absurdities
Whenever the protagonist acts humanly, he is branded "crazy" by the officers. Our design concept "Typographic Absurdities" translates these absurd moments based on their semantic meaning.
An officer declares that the mandatory 3 years in the NVA would be the blink of an eye. "36 small months".
The wall between East and West Germany was an "Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart".
An officer finds a book by Friedrich Schiller — published in the West, by the "class enemy".
Absurd typeface
The typeface used for the "Typographic Absurdities" is Soyuz Grotesk — a font with a Cyrillic feel that mixes uppercase and lowercase letters, resulting in a truly absurd typographic image.
The Colorless GDR
What makes the book memorable is its dominant neon red — a color that defies expectations for a book about the GDR.
Particularly on the color-inverted pages, where the author draws connections to the present day, we play with the limits of legibility.
Real craftmanship!
For pragmatic reasons, we chose to have only the black areas printed commercially, then screen-printed the neon red passages onto the open press sheets ourselves.
Finally, we had the book bound. To allow readers to open the book completely flat, we opted for thread-sewn binding with a Swiss brochure-style hardcover.
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Branding
Strategy