Students are anonymized by the implementation of alphanumeric IDs. Being too long to instantly memorize, these IDs mark the students’ works throughout the publication. The book is split into five chapters: Characteristics, Principles, Content, Positions and Results.

In the chapter ‘Characteristics’, students are sorted according to several properties relating to their person, their work and their submitted contents. Thus, the notion of a chronological sorting throughout the book is deconstructed and instead, the variety of differing sequences forming the publication is introduced.

The chapter ‘Principles’ forms the imaginary design collective’s manifesto. It mixes up the two voices of the BA and MA department director to strengthen the feeling of unity.

In ‘Content’, all images are sorted by properties such as brightness, size and formal specifications. By stripping the images of their contextual information and reducing them to their visual qualities, a coherent body of work is formed.

The chapter ‘Positions’ shows the students’ statements on the manifesto at the beginning of the publication. They are gathered by topic and sorted by author ID numbers. While students decided freely on which positions to react to, this chapter forms a carpet of varied opinions without focus on individual voices.

In the chapter ‘Results’, the students’ journey within the collective comes to an end. This is reflected with an outro containing the project descriptions of the BA and MA diplomas, again sorted by the author ID numbers.

The concept and basic structure of the publication are reflected and completed on the front and back cover. The front portrays all members of the collective (the students) in a uniform manner; lighting, clothing, hairstyles and poses are aligned to create a mass of nearly indistinguishable people—a single collective. The back shows the ID numbers assigned to the people depicted, creating a complementary correspondence to the front.

Special attention was given to the production of the publication. Materiality, printing methods and binding were carefully directed. Using three coatings of white and one coating of black for certain highlights on a slightly yellowish natural paper, a higher contrast and clarity for the images was reached, comparing to what would have been possible on the same paper without coatings. To further highlight the IDs and draw a reference to ID card / passport numbers, the codes were lined with white coatings and thereafter printed a second time on top of the lining. Additional references to security features in print were made with a custom ‘VC’ guilloche pattern that was overlaid in black on top of all images. For further print and editorial case studies, visit our archive →.