Poetry on the Road 2009
Year: 2009
Client: Poetry on the Road
Team: Friederike Lambers, Boris Müller, Florian Pfeffer
Poetry on the Road is an international literature festival which is held every year in Bremen, Germany. From 2002 — 2013, I was commisioned to design a visual theme for the festival. While the theme itself was changing, the underlying idea for the visuals was always the same: All graphics were generated by a computer program that turned texts into images. So every image is the direct representation of a specific text. The design and the development process were a collaboration with the design agency one/one.
Despite the high visual resolution, the basic concept of the 2009 key visual is almost embarrasingly simple – it is just a combination of a Treemap visualization algorithm and a Code128B bar code generator.
The software follows clearly defined rules. The complex line structure of the visual consists of closely packed bar codes that correspond to the words of the poems. The motive is thus a direct translation of the text into a visual language.