Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Text: Lewis Carroll
Dimensions: 20 × 25 cm
Hardcover 252 p.
2006

This book was never published. We wrote and designed it as a part of our showcase in attempt to get a book design commission. Also, we just had such strong urge to create books and games that we would design them no matter if we were paid or not (we didn’t get paid for any our web games, but we invested months of work in them, anyway).

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was designed for an illustrators’ competition in France. At the time we were still students, but this was our first children’s book project finished without consulting it with our professors . It has an obvious flaw of being unreadable. No one could ever read a book typesetted this way. Unfortunately, in the beginning of 2000s it was a trademark of a lot of projects designed by people at the Academy.

The concept for the book was inspired by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Each chapter opens with a spread showing Alice sleeping in her bed. The rest is a dream. A collage of images surfaced from subconscious. A mix of pop culture, memories, fears, and desires. Each spread is a matching game where readers guess the connection between part of the text, adjacent illustration, and little icons used as paragraph markers.

This book is aggressive and full of different, sometimes erratic concepts, but it was a wonderful playground for us to test a lot of ideas. Probably the main advantage of our unpublished books designed just after graduation was the ability to make a lot of mistakes without any consequences. It was the fastest way to discover what we like and where to go next. Creating seven books in one year didn’t produce the best output of all time but it certainly was the most intense learning experience that we could get at that time.