Survival of the Fittest

Designing Darwin

Easily one of the most influencial books of the last two hundred years was Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859. The root of his idea, that life is not the top-down work of a creator, but rather a bottom-up process of evolution, did nothing less than turn the world upside down. The goal of this design project followed a similar trajectory: take Darwin’s original text, and evolve a design system that typeset his words faithfully as well as enhancing his meaning with suitable imagery. The final result was inspired by Darwin’s journals as well as the central work of evolution: mutation.