PaperSpecsGallery.com Presents: UVA Bicentennial Program

Directed by the university to make the piece “feel like a party,” Watermark blended beautiful black and white photography with colorful design accents and bold typography inside the booklet, which highlighted  some of the programs scheduled to be part of the UVA bicentennial  celebration – a strong visual suggestion of the past and present colliding.

The interior pages were printed on 80 lb. Rolland Opaque Smooth Text. The real crowning glory of this piece, however, are the program’s multiple covers. It is in these that the past and present truly come together as one.

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Working from the outside inward, we have a very short short-cover made  of 80 lb. Orange Neenah Astrobrights Orbit Cover, alive with tactile appeal thanks to a crisp blind emboss featuring the official Bicentennial mark – itself inspired by Jefferson’s own original sketches for the school’s rotunda.

The founding father’s handiwork appears again on the second layer – a  half-cover boasting a detailed sketch of that same rotunda on translucent 48 lb. Glama Natural Clear from CTI Paper. The product of pure design inspiration, Jefferson’s rendering on this sheet lines up perfectly with a photo of the real-life rotunda on the full cover just beneath this one, the photo’s details clearly emerging through the translucent Glama sheet – past and present, indivisible! (That photo  sheet is 100 lb. Rolland Opaque Smooth Cover.)

In the end, this program for the University of Virginia’s bicentennial, like its founder’s own vision for the country he helped to usher into being, is greater than the sum of its parts.