Visit Perinthia

Travel posters are a common way for cities to promote their unique qualities to potential tourists. But what happens when you are promoting a fictional city? This was exactly the task that I tackled with Perinthia, a fictional city written about by Italo Calvino. Below is the story of Perinthia, the city of the sky.

"Summoned to lay down the rules for the foundation of Perinthia, the astronomers established the place and the day according to the position of the stars; they drew the intersecting lines of the decumanus and the cardo, the first oriented to the passage of the sun and the other like the axis on which the heavens turn. They divided the map according to the twelve houses of the zodiac so that each temple and each neighborhood would receive the proper influence of the favoring constellations; they fixed the point in the walls where gates should be cut, foreseeing how each would frame and eclipse of the moon in the next thousand years. Perinthia -- they guaranteed -- would reflect the harmony of the firmament; nature's reason and the gods' benevolence would shape the inhabitants' destinies.

Following the astronomers' calculations precisely, Perinthia was constructed; various peoples came to populate it; the first generation born in Perinthia began to grow within its walls; and these citizens reached the age to marry and have children. In Perinthia's streets and square today you enter cripples, dwarfs, hunchbacks, obese men, bearded women. But the worse cannot be seen; guttural howls are heard from cellars and lofts, where families hide children with three heads or with six legs. Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters."

This project presented a few unique challenges. For starters, the information provided was very limited. There was no visual information to reference like there would be for real cities. There was also the content provided in the text. How do I combine the beautiful concept of the heavens and the sky with the grotesque nature of monsters and beings with multiple limbs and deformities?

I began by posting the text within my notebook and taking notes from the text itself. I defined words I didn't understand and began doodling possible ideas. The idea of the heavens stuck in my mind, and I began to think about the concept of angels. More specifically, I began to think about biblically accurate angels. Within the bible, angels are often described to have multiple eyes, with large rings and sometimes multiple faces. They were fearsome beings, but also comforting and protective. This idea of multiple eyes stuck with me as I began to create a mood board and explore images of biblically accurate angels. Perinthia is described to have people born there with multiple limbs, so the possibility of people being born there with multiple eyes was not far off.

I decided that the travel poster should resemble a star chart. Perinthia was made by scientists based on the heavens, and so it would only make sense to have a travel poster that was orderly, quiet, and resembled the heavens, too. The thin lines of the chart and the round nature of stars inspired the form of the icon system that I would draw for the twelve zodiacs. The concept of biblically accurate angels led me to incorporate the use of eyes everywhere. They are within each of the zodiacs as a core design element, and they became the watchful eyes of the city's capital building that was placed in the center of the design itself.

From my created icon and color system, I made two postcards and four shirts. The shirts were a big challenge. Each zodiac, while confined in to a circular structure, does not take up that circle in the same way. In order to balance the designs on each shirt, I put them in to a circle and punched the zodiac design out of said circle. That was I was able to make a triangular structure with each shirt.

Year: 2024
Art Director: Derek Wituki
Institution: Pennsylvania Western Edinboro