ExLibris
/ˌeks ˈlēbris/ - “from the library of”
About -
An independent print zine that housed a collection of experiences a group of students had while living & studying in France. Cognizant of the profound change we were undergoing we become more interested in sharing from our personal library of stories than writing about Europe, hence the name ExLibris.
OBJECTIVE
To examine the unordinary lives of a group of young ex-pats living in a quiet French town on the border of Switzerland. Through essays, comics, photo stories, and illustrations we deep dive into the minds of these students and how they are processing this year of change.
Written in both English and French, the French translation serves as another insight into who the author is since it is done at the proficiency level of the author.
TEAM
Rachel Aka - Co-Creator, Photographer & Art Director
Amber Kuo - Co-Creator, Designer & Art Director
Valeria Merino- Illustrator
Brielle Tym- Copy Editor
9 Content Contributors
CHALLENGES
Budget
Securing sponsorship for the printing and distribution.
Translation
Make sure translations were faithful to the author’s intent while also being well written and engaging for both French and English readers.
Resources
As the project grew our needs for a variety of resources did as well, pushing us to have to be more creative and inventive in our problem-solving.
DETAILS
2,500 Copies Printed
SPONSORS
Adventist University of France
I.FLE - Institute of French as a Foreign Language
The Design -
Like any good independent project, this one started in a dorm room with a dream.
Moving furniture to make room to plan layouts, set up a small photo studio, or just to have a place to meet and work together.
We worked together, everyone’s input was valued. This provided us with constant feedback and inspired us to improve upon our creation with every iteration.
PREFACE
“Even with its feet deep in shit it still sings!”
This is why the rooster is the emblem of France. It embodies their resilience and we wanted to capture that spirit in our book.
We choose to make this layout symmetrical in balance with lots of white space to help the reader familiarize themselves with not only the content but the way it will be presented in two languages simultaneously.
PALE BLUE DOT
This comic strip was drawn to illustrate what it felt like living in France, narrated by an excerpt from The Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. It helped us to examine the tiny micro-culture we created by living together.
Comics are big in France and we knew from the start we wanted to design one for our zine. We felt drawn to participating in this cultural craze with our own story.
One constraint of making this comic was limited room for text, and to not overfill our small pages, we choose that this would be the only piece done in solely English. A small sacrifice we chose to make to maintain legibility and visual balance.
Illustrated by the talented Valeria Merino.
AND ALL IS GONE AT DAWN
A short essay exploring the magic that cities seem to have when night falls. In this piece, we follow the author on a journey through Geneva, Switzerland that lasted all night.
Leveille, the author of this piece, wanted to make her translation unique. Her translation was more of a poetic reinterpretation of the original text. Running with this idea this translation was used as more of a graphic element than text meant to be read.
We knew we needed a strong title page to introduce the story. We painted a map of Geneva on Leveille herself and photographed her to be our cover star. This allowed the two spreads to play off each other like yin and yang.
