Muza asked me to redesign Murakami’s Polish backlist. I wanted the books to feel related without making endless variations of the same cover, so I built a visual grammar rather than a template: modular grids, found images, changing 4-colour palettes, and a small set of recurring geometric forms.
The geometry came from the books themselves. Triangles and broken shapes suggest movement, transitions and transformation. Circles became portals, entrances into another reality, or places where different planes of existence overlap: the well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the two moons of 1Q84. The images are often ordinary, slightly dated, sometimes almost banal. Inside this system, they start to feel unstable, much as everyday reality does in Murakami.
Each cover can therefore behave differently while still belonging to the same world. That was the point: not to illustrate the novels literally, but to make the whole backlist feel as if reality might shift a few centimetres at any moment.
Year: 2024–2025
Page size: 135×200 mm
Pages: 224–800
Paper: EccoBook 70 g 2.0
Binding: paperback
Typefaces: Obviously, Paperback
Typefaces: Obviously, Paperback
