Bringing together key African authors, Edições Sesc, in co-publication with Editora Zahar, launches the ‘Biblioteca Africana’ collection (African Library). Non-fiction works covering the broad areas of philosophy, political experiences, literary and art criticism, history, and social theory make up the collection, which was developed in conjunction with an advisory board formed by Kabengele Munanga, Edson Lopes Cardoso, Sueli Carneiro, Tiganá Santana, and Luciane Ramos-Silva.
Due to the diversity of themes addressed by the collection, we guided the creation of the graphic design through typography. Inspired by African aesthetic expressions marked by very evident geometry, such as Kuba weavings (originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo) and patterns created by the Manjak people (in Senegal), we used the authors' names as a source of variation to compose a unique graphic design for each cover, while maintaining the same constructive root among the titles in the collection.
Using modules formed by circles and diamonds, we filled a grid covering the entire cover, composing the name of the author of the title. In this sense, the typography breaks away from legibility to function as graphics that compose the covers and back covers of the collection.
