The Brain as an open book 2019

Designers: Danne Ojeda, d-file, Singapore
Client: Florence Biennale, Florence (FI), Italy

The brain as an open book is a brochure designed to present the artwork Vanitas in the XII Florence Art Biennale, Florence, Italy. The biennale marked the fifth centenary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death in 2019 and aimed to be a point of reflection and homage to the creative life of this master of the Renaissance.

On this occasion, this brochure design pays attention to the ‘mirror writing’ calligraphy of Leonardo Da Vinci to create a sort of ‘mirror reading’ as a design strategy that will capture the reader’s attention.

‘Mirror writing’ is a writing technique Leonardo Da Vinci’s used to annotate commentaries on his artworks and his creative process in his sketchbooks. The writing runs from right to left (opposite to how typically a person writes a text), and with the individual letters also reversed. ‘Mirror-reading’ is then the ability to read the text with the assistance of a mirror.

For this brochure, the designer Danne Ojeda created an intentional mirror-reading effect by printing the text of the brochure using transparent paper and transforming the leading of the lines of text that runs in all the pages. This creates a visual superimposition of the text when the brochure is closed that threatens the text legibility and that incites the reader to open the brochure to read its content (which is an interview by Steve Heller with the author on the work exhibited in the biennale).

Last, Mirror reading Vanitas as a design strategy also functions as an equivalent to the process of art criticism and reflection onto an artwork already created when analyzing in detail—with a sort of magnifying glass—its units of meaning.