Emeka Ogboh. Lagos Soundscapes
Pioneer sound artist Emeka Ogboh is one of the most exciting artists on the international art scene. For Kerber Verlag, we designed “Lagos Soundscapes”, a book about him that is a compendium of Ogboh’s early corpus of works (2009 – 2014) and focused on Lagos, Nigerias economic and cultural capital. Only subtle typographic differences between the bilingual French and English text-languages highlight an important part of Ogboh’s Œvre: the normalisation of a hybrid society. The artist catalogue was honoured with the »Red Dot Award: Brands & Communication Design«.
- Kerber Verlag
- Emeka Ogboh. Lagos Soundscapes
- 2018
Lagos Soundscapes is the first significant monograph on the work of Emeka Ogboh. Like sound, hiding in the depths of the speaker, the cover art is printed on the back of Bamberger Canoso Kaliko phoenix 132 g/m². It hides behind the yellow linen, waiting for the reader to unleash the content. We chose two different paper qualities for documentary and artistic content. The documentary content is printed on thin uncoated Salzer EOS 1.5 Natural 60 g/m² to merge the bilingual languages on the sheet, while still guaranteeing a pleasant reading experience.
English texts on right pages run fully aligned, while french texts on the next left page run left-aligned, so the bilingual texts seemingly belong together. As if they were one big text, there is no formatting to separate the two languages. They appear as hybrid as possible, while still providing a comfortable reading experience of the partly philosophical and political texts. The typeface Berlingske Serif was chosen to resemble an urban newspapers, which many people in the world are familiar with. In contrast to this and in harmony with the mostly bold and graphic work of Emeka Ogboh, Theinhardt, a modern grotesk, was chosen as headline typeface.
