(Not Too Much) Lost in Translation

July 7, 2009 on 8:20 pm | By Michael | In Gigs | 5 Comments

I recently worked with Art Director Maili Holiman designing the opening page and titles for an article about the Somali pirates for the July issue of Wired Magazine (it might take a few moments for this article to load). No sooner had I finished doing the five pieces of art than I was contacted by Wired Italia, who asked me to recreate all the art I had done—but in Italian. Recreating designs with different wording can be challenging as my designs are usually based on the specific letters I’m dealing with, how they relate to one another, how many words there are, etc. The main piece was particularly challenging as the design was more complicated than the others. But at least the main word kept the cap “C” which otherwise would have posed a major problem:

After dealing with the the opener the four other heads were slightly less problematic to deal with:

I don’t know, but it seems to me in some cases the Italian version might even work slightly better than it’s English counterpart. I had never before dealt with this type of problem, but can only guess that with our shrinking world we’ll be seeing more and more of this type of crossover.