Colors Notebook Violence: The world seen by the rest of the world

"A magazine about the rest of the world" – so reads the celebrated subtitle of the magazine Colors.

With their latest project, the creative minds at Fabrica breathe new life into that motto. In cooperation with Reporters sans Frontières, they used various means to distribute blank notebooks to international graphic designers, illustrators, artists, photographers, and filmmakers – and also, of course, to students in every creative profession.

But it isn’t just creative professionals they have in their sights with the Notebook Project but – much more broadly – people of all ages and social classes and from a wide range of ethnic, religious, and political communities all over the world.

With 3,500 richly illustrated notebooks full of drawings and collages already submitted, the time is right to engage in a provisional stocktaking.

This is done here with a little series of books that selects the best from the works submitted, organizes it thematically, and annotates it professionally.

The result is an attractive invitation to graphic designers and illustrators, who are already increasingly employing traditional graphic techniques, to allow themselves to be stimulated by the variety of styles on offer. For "there is hardly a designer today who isn’t full of enthusiasm for vernacular culture, graffiti, amateurish drawings, and charmingly misused typography" (Gerrit Terstiege, editor in chief of form).

The volume Violence is a frightening demonstration of just how completely the subject of violence dominates the world today.

Violence done by human beings to other human beings, whether in the private sphere of personal relations, in the form of coerced and degrading living conditions, or in the open brutality of war and civil war.

The artistic documents selected here are expressions of that violence, images and signs that represent or indict. By doing so with a creative engagement that seeks to produce a sense of shock and personal involvement in the viewer, they speak implicitly but unmistakably of the dignity of their creators and the injuries they have suffered.