Das Luka-Evangelium was made by Orphea Joanna Heutling as her Bachelor thesis project at HFBK Hamburg. From the author and designer (translated):
Das Luka-Evangelium is an experimental translation of the Bible in which, based on research into the representation of gender diversity in heroic narratives, some of the male characters in the Gospel of Luke have been transformed into women and non-binary people. The original text is 85% male, as the Bible is a book written by men for men.
Das Luka-Evangelium was written for a diverse contemporary audience, just as the four Gospels are each their own version of the story for their respective times and audiences, and often deviate from historical facts. In the spirit of plurality in faith, this translation is intended to complement, not supersede, other translations.
To design this book, Heutling used Muoto (Matthieu Cortat, 205TF) and ABC Marist (Seb McLauchlan, Dinamo).
1 Comment on “Das Luka-Evangelium”
I think this perfectly illustrates the case of many current typographic decisions: setting ancient or “classical” (or canonical, etc.) literary content in book form—though this doesn’t apply only to the Bible; for example, imagine publishing Homer in a sans-serif font.
In this case (this book), the combination of a serif font (itself somewhat humanistic, though contemporary—and, importantly, based on the Venetian school, with some extremely subtle Renaissance influences—used for the words of the biblical text) and a sans-serif font (for what appears to be an essay or commentary in the appendix) worked very well together, as a unified design choice.
Furthermore, the Mallarméan typographic arrangement that precedes the chapters is also interesting and has its own visual merit. It works the same way as italics—it’s used for emphasis. But in this arrangement, the effect is extremely strong and intensified, since the reader only sees what was meant to be emphasized (which is what’s written), as if the rest of the text had been erased because of that very emphasis. In that sense, it’s a very creative choice.
There was also no “clutter” in using Muoto to emphasize words in the text (consistent with the book’s purpose). As it reads on the page:
All in all, a wonderful book!