MARGIN WOMEN
Project Type
Print and Social Impact Design
Brief
The ISTD 2025 “Milestones” brief challenges students to investigate a subject matter that represents a significant milestone or series of milestones, whether personal, historical, cultural or societal and present a compelling and contextually rich typographic driven design outcome.
Problem
Women’s expressive voices and historical contributions to literature have been erased, discredited, overshadowed, marginalised and undermined due to the patriarchal system within the literary and publication industry.
Insight
For women, writing has been more than just an outlet for creative expression, it has been a form of activism to help challenge the system and reclaim the space they were previously silenced in. The truth is that women want to be recognised and feel like their presence in society and the world is significant.
Concept
Margin Women is an A5 chapbook using margins, grids and typography, tools associated with order and hierarchy, as a metaphor for the patriarchal systems that reduced and confined female writers to footnotes and margins. Using the very tools that erased them, as both a medium and a message, we can reframe the page, honour the interconnected system of women who have held up the literary world and shift the system, bringing women out of the margins and into the main narrative.
Solution
From the outside, the chapbook takes on an A5 format, paying homage to the traditional book size. Symbolically, bound with a chain stitch of red thread, subliminally representing how women were confined to domesticity, and visually representing the interwoven system of women who have left a written legacy behind. On the inside, a disruptive and rich narrative arc unfolds, from introducing the problem in context, highlighting essential women who have been erased to resisting the grid system and reclaiming the space they were once denied.
