7. After October 7
Book DesignArt DirectionAfter October 7 is a special edition of Jewish Currents, a 250 page book of essays, reports and poetry from, and about the war waged by Israel against Gaza following the October 7th 2023 attacks. Published in Winter 2024
October 7th and it’s aftermath fundamentally disrupted the Jewish institutional landscape. Immediately following, Jewish Currents had to reorient to a radically sped up news cycle, and a new level of our work’s impact. In the months of October 2023 through December 2023, Jewish Currents which normally published content 1-2 times a week, now published 2-3 times daily. In this time Jewish Currents published a series of dispatches from correspondents in Gaza and the Westbank, and a slew of reports and analysis on the situation. As our quarterly print schedule caught up with us, I made the proposal for an archival issue dealing with content specific to the situation.
As Art Director at Jewish Currents, I wanted to make our Winter 2024 issue an object that lives more in history than in our print editions, and along with the Editor-in-Chief, made the creative decision to publish our longform content from after october 7th as an A5 Book, with a refined print production.
My book design followed from art and look and feel cues that invoked the agony of the present, watching a catastrophe unfold, and remembering Walter Benjamin's Angel looking to the past and seeing a pile of wreckage. I maximized aggressive typographic hierarchy, and a duotone color palette using the double and contradictory meaning of olive green, invoking both military uniforms, and the olive branch. My editorial design favored full spreads for art and pull quotes on color blocks. With the cover art, I walked back my original “tear” direction after internal concerns, and landed on a formal solution that functioned in my tension I wanted to invoke between content and design.
The result is a striking book as a design object that has become a collectible piece of ephemera exceeding the Jewish Currents subscription base, as well as an object that functioned to increase subscriptions 60% more than average subscription drive.