Butterfliege – A Story about Butterflies
The belief in witches is a topic that is inevitably associated with superstition – but very few think of a connection with the butterfly and its word origin. According to medieval superstitions, witches turned into butterflies at night to spoil or steal cream or milk. Schmetten, Schmette (Slav. Smetana) is the old east/central German word of Slavic origin for sour cream or butter.
This book deals with folk beliefs and symbolism based on passages from Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Institoris, Walpurgisnacht by Moritz Busch, Tiefe Schatten (“Deep Shadows”) by Theodor Storm, and other texts.
The booklet was made during a course at the Hochschule Düsseldorf (University of Applied Sciences) with Prof. Holger Jacobs, and produced as a single edition in 2019.
The selected typefaces reflect the topic of the book and the atmosphere through the illustrations. Apoc (Matthieu Salvaggio) is used for texts. Desert (Leah Maldonado) is used for numbers and illustration captions. Headlines and section pages are set in Lily by Antoine Brun.
Lily takes her roots from the theme of chimeras and didones, a family used in entomology and botany books. An exquisite corpse of typographic families and testifying to the chimeric aspect of the fusion ligature of two letters.
