Bored Jar

Index ES

2023
Poster design
Watercolour illustration
Self-initiated

Feria del Libro Independiente

An independent book fair has to say two things at once: that there are books, and that this is not the official one. The poster says both by handing a novel to a giant squid.

The fair poster in a street display case beside a park bench: a red watercolour squid holding a green book on a white field, under the headline Feria del libro independiente.
On the street The squid edition

Everyone draws books

The book fair is the most literal brief in graphic design. To advertise books almost everybody draws books - a stack of them, an open spread, a silhouette reading under a tree. The category ends up interchangeable, which is a poor result for any fair and a fatal one for a small fair that also has to explain it isn't the big one down the road.

Watercolour illustration of a red giant squid reading a small green book, surrounded by pale blue bubbles.
Watercolour illustration of an orange octopus holding a dark blue book above its head, with bubbles rising past it.
Watercolour illustration of a violet jellyfish with pink and cyan tentacles, an open orange book caught among them.
The three readers Squid, octopus, jellyfish

Improbable readers

So this poster doesn't draw books. It draws readers. A giant squid, an octopus and a jellyfish: deep-water animals, strange, solitary, spineless, a long way outside anybody's circuit. Each one is holding a book as though nothing about that were unusual.

Nobody needs the metaphor explained. These are books for a different kind of fauna. The idea lands before you reach the dates, which is all a poster on a street ever gets.

The same poster format in a street case against a brick wall, this time with the orange octopus holding a book.
The octopus edition Same layout, different animal

Painted, not placed

Everything is watercolour, and that is the second half of the argument. Watercolour is the technique that shows the hand most and hides the machine least. In a category advertised with stock photography and flat vectors, painting the thing by hand is a claim about independence made before the headline is read.

The white field isn't empty either. Bubbles drift across it from top to bottom, which turns the sheet into water - so whoever stops at the poster is submerged along with the squid.

What it comes down to

Three animals, one idea, and not a single stack of books. A fair that couldn't afford to look like the others found a way to look like nothing else, using the cheapest asset in design: an idea that needs no caption.

A self-initiated Bored Jar project. The institutional marks along the foot of the poster belong to the original academic exercise; none of those bodies commissioned or endorsed this work.

Design work

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