We’ve Lost The Plot

Book Design   |   Apr 2023

We’ve Lost The Plot features excerpts from Megan Garber’s article of the same name. It explores how the proliferation of digital media desensitizes us, transforming news into entertainment, politics into celebrity, truth into plot fodder, and tragedy into fiction. 

In designing the book, I sought to emulate a digital space in an analog form. Iterations focused particularly on the tension between the glossy and glamorized presentation of media and the haze and deteroriation of truth that results from it. These dueling factors are borne of a digital space, so I decided to develop a language of digital references that could direct the book. This language informed everything—even the section markers and the book size were pulled from digital formats.

This theme is further developed through type-as-image. As the book progresses, the digital degeneration of type grows bolder, brighter, and gaudier just as its form becomes less and less reliable. It both co-opts and distorts the language of entertainment, transforming the book itself into an almost digital space.