The poetry collection Winterkil (“Winterchill”) is available at the end of april 2021. It contains short poems on love and life.

For this publication, we have created 65 unique illustrations. Every illustrations shows an abstract snowflake on a mottled blue background. Properties of the poem that adjoins the illustration, such as the length of the sentences and the usage of words, determine the shape of the snowflakes.

Every snowflake is made up of a straight cross (north-south-east-west) and a crooked cross (northeast-southeast-southwest-northwest). The shape of the straight cross is dependent on the ratio ofI-words” (I, me and my) andyou-words’. There are seven shapes for the straight cross. How the crooked cross looks depends on the length of the poem (number of lines). There are also seven shapes for this cross.
The size of both crosses also varies. The number of words per line defines the size of the straight cross (a higher average of words corresponds to a bigger cross). The average word length defines the size of the crooked cross (a higher average word length creates a bigger cross).

Working from a list of negative words, the center of the crystal is chosen. The more negative words a poem has, the more complex the shape becomes. There are five center shapes.

And the background shows a number of colored balls. The number of balls shows the number of lines in the poem (4 lines create 4 balls, a poem with 12 lines has 12 balls etc.). The color of each ball correlates to the first letter of each line. Every letter of the alphabet has its own colour.

Skills DESIGN, INFORMATION PROJECT, STUDIO VLAK