In 2011 I was asked by the Literary Society of Thuringia to join a pioneer book project as designer and concept creator.
The brief was to develop a book framework to showcase children’s reproductions and illustrations of bible stories. From 2012 to 2017 the project initiators planned to perform yearly sessions in which pupils listened to, discussed, reproduced and illustrated stories from the Old and the New Testament.
Their first idea was to create a small A5 sized book every year, but the importance of the anniversary and even more the effort and joy that went into the children’s work made me suggest a bigger format. Starting from the size of the original Gutenberg Bible, we then fixed on almost A3 format to give the pupil’s work enough space.
An important criterion was to have the original bible story run alongside the children’s reproductions. So I chose to divide the original text by the number of pupils who chose to retell the specific story, placed the original words in the middle of the page and created a paper printout template for the pupils to write their reproduction around this text—just like annotations found in several older bibles.
In a second step the pupils illustrated their stories using techniques that were to change every year—from calligraphy to painting and printing on to photography and computer generated imaging. So finally, every child would have his own spread in the book, with his story on one and his illustration on the other page.
I helped create the first and the second book, starting the series. The following books are now being laid out by different designers, basing their work on the style guide and templates I provided.
The project “Weimarer Kinderbibel” won the 2014 Thuringian Cultural Prize.
