In the winter edition of his literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, Francis Ford Coppola melds fine design with first-rate literature through guest designer Yves Béhar.
Working with the writings of Alice Munro, Olaf Olafsson, Sarah Polley and Robert Olen “Bob” Butler is not a reach for Béhar, an industrial designer and founder of the design atelier fuseproject. Like Coppola, the moviemaker who started the literary quarterly in 1997, Béhar is big on storytelling, so he was a natural for honorary art director of Zoetrope’s team. And Béhar and fuseproject were given free reign to design everything from the magazine’s logo to the cover, content pages and even the subscription ad.
“Storytelling is at the heart of our practice at fuseproject,” Béhar said. “Using our product work to illustrate stories goes to the core of what we believe design can do — connect emotionally and tell stories.”
But it’s not exactly light reading. Hanif Kureishi writes of “Weddings and Beheadings” and Polley, an actress and director drawn to less-than-sunny characters, delves into “On Marriage and Fiction.” Despite being challenged, scared and excited, fuseproject forged ahead by tapping artist Ari Marcopoulos to shoot its work on-site in the firm’s San Francisco offices. A shadowy close-up of the office floor accompanies Olafsson’s “On the Lake.”
“The exercise of illustrating profound and sometimes dark stories from the authors made us discover new aspects of our own work in enriching ways,” Béhar said.
Another key creative force was artist Tucker Nichols, whom Béhar commissioned in 2005 to create a 60-foot mural for fuseproject. Elements of that piece adorn Butler’s short story “18 1/2” and traces of fuseproject’s personal story can be found within.
“No more jokes about them when they leave” and “You can always write smaller” are a few of the catch phrases Nichols overheard at the company’s San Francisco offices, and he incorporated them into the mural.
Fuseproject products abound in the issue, but are barely identified. With the exception of a few light sculptures designed for Swarovski, Gaia & Gino’s wild dog bowl and Tylenol bottles, most of the commercial pieces are not spelled out in the two pages of credits. More than anything, Béhar hopes the magazine’s imagery and design work help readers to see design “in a new light: an expressive light.”