Conza della Campania

The subject of this book is about the disaster of the Irpinia earthquake in 1980. It is the result of a collaboration with a schoolmate from ISIA Urbino, Simona Gallo. She conducted the iconographic research and she explored the area many times. I was asked to help her design and implement a composition process which would return the violence and destruction of the event.

We decided to translate the earthquake’s most violent wave into a table of integer values referring to each page of our book. These values were then used in two ways:

• To decide how many photos should be picked and put on the canvas
• To shake the photos from their center of gravity on the canvas

We opted for a multiply raster filter in order to depict the progressive stratification of debris, meaning a quite demanding calculation process. I managed to get a good compromise between speed and image quality using the Python Image Library. Each spread was generated as a tiff file and then iteratively composed into InDesign and combined with other content, as preface and afterword.

The project grew as an exam for Mauro Bubbico’s design class at ISIA Urbino.