Master's Degree Thesis

Masterd Degree Thesis Design

TYPE

Book Design

YEAR

2017

CLIENT

Personal project

I always said that I would have enjoyed more designing my thesis rather than write it...

My master degree thesis project in Building Engineering and Architecture at Università di Pisa is about the urban and territorial regeneration of Larderello and the Val di Cecina, Tuscany.

One thing I knew from the very beginning: full spread pictures, charts and renders would have been the heart of this project, so I needed a binding that would allow to fully open the book without loosing any millimeter of the images: the sandwich created by Massimo Vignelli was perfect.
Two layers of 3mm naked cardboard with a filling of 204 180x300mm digitally printed pages of wonderful Fedrigoni Oikos 115gsm paper.

Set the container, the font: Grilli Type's GT Walsheim with its round, geometric and fresh shapes was perfect for the job.

Than the layout: optimizing the maximum dimension of printing area for one sheet of paper on the proportion of the cartography I made of the area of study, I ended up choosing a 180x300 mm final format, single-columned with a lot of white space around the text box; I used a 4 column underlying grid to organize content and images.
The baseline grid is set at 7,5pt, using for the body a 11pt Light and for the headings a 13pt and 15pt GT Walesheim Bold.

I used Google Docs to write the thesis, linking the document to InDesign with DocsFlow by Em Software: this allowed me to continuously update my .indd with the correct copy.

This wonderful printing and binding job has been done by Bandecchi & Vivaldi in Pontedera, thanks to the great support of Alex. I printed 9 copies: three with black cover for my family, three with gray cover for me and my boy, three with ivory cover for the relators.