Rebecca Leffell Koren is a graphic designer and educator with a practice grounded in type-driven publication, exhibition, and systems design.

PROTOCOLS

(6.75×8.625 in, 152pp)

Daniela Naomi Molnar’s Protocols: An Erasure is a book-length erasure poem that redacts the antisemitic document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Drawing light from darkness, Molnar’s work is a meticulous, questioning, sensitive, and searing act that mines depth from a document so flat, fictitious, and dangerous. Inhabiting a structure of enumerated “Protocols,” the poem beats rhythmically across the page, punctuating the surgically intentional erasure inherent to Molnar’s process. Meaning is palpable in the spaces that surround the words and lines that wind through the book’s pages.

The design integrates hints of typographic reference to the original text, as well as motifs that Molnar draws out—of power, asterisms, annotation and circulation. The cover and interstitial sequences are designed, in method and visual tone, in reference to the carbon copy—calling to the widespread distribution and translation of the original antisemitic text, as its message continues to be repurposed and reconfigured to disseminate an age-old hate. Handwritten marks denote evidence of the individualized attention and active reading in copies that remain accessible to the public through libraries and online archives.

Protocols: An Erasure is available for purchase through Ayin Press.
Book cover photography by Meghan Kirkwood.

EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN

Branding, website and collateral design for Everything Under the Sun, a public art installation by Jonathan Stitelman. Realized with the support of the Design Openings initiative, the project invites close engagement with the the sun, time, and one another.

The wordmark—tightly spaced and with articulated apertures—rhymes with the shadows formed by the intricate spacing between the spines of the installation. The website plays with shifts in the colors of sunrise and sunset, letting the scroll carry hues past one another, as would the colors of the rising and setting sun.

everything-under-the-sun.org

Additional team member credits available on the project website. Everything Under the Sun is made possible by Design Openings, a collaboration between the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Invisible

(8.5×10.5 in, 352pp)

Invisible documents the prolific practice of architecture studio Axi:Ome, LLC, led by Heather Woofter and Sung Ho Kim, presenting an expansive portfolio of projects and supporting essays. The design utilizes layering and emphasizes a lateral pull across typographic planes and graphic relationships to reveal the invisible plate tectonics of collaboration and the negotiation of variables within the architectural process.

Book photography by Meghan Kirkwood.

WHEREAS HOOPS

(6×8.75 in, 54pp)

Whereas Hoops is an artist book created with John Early and Noah Cohan for their activist effort Whereas Hoops. Whereas Hoops calls our attention to the lack of basketball courts in Forest Park, linking it to the complex history of racial relations in St. Louis and the veil of prejudice that overlays the relationship of the city and the sport of basketball.

Humans of saint louis

(8.25×10 in, 544pp)

Humans of St. Louis is a 544-page photography book that, with nuance and care, captures the beauty and complexity of life in St. Louis through portraits and narratives from its citizens. The book employs a textured typographic palette, referential to the rich vernacular typographic history of St. Louis' industrial past, as well as it being the location of notable type foundries active in the 19th and 20th centuries. The typographic voice brings a visual rhythm that reinforces the diversity of the people within the pages of the book. Front and back inserts are printed in a two-color run that correlates warm red to the prominence of brick, and blue to the city's place along the Mississippi river. Photographic collage sequences guide the reader into the book through the architectural texture and landscape of the city as an entry point to meeting its inhabitants.

Designed with Audra Hubbell.

Book photography by Meghan Kirkwood.

HERE AND NEXT

(7.5×10.5 in, 126pp)

Annual report for the Washington University in St. Louis ten-year strategic plan, Here and Next. The book features faculty and staff profiles, bolstered by the year’s project milestones, to brings a human-centered approach to the collaboration, planning and implementation of the University’s ambitious goals.

Designed with Audra Hubbell.

MFA VIEWBOOK

(6×9in, 128pp)

2 editions, 2017 and 2019

Viewbook for the MFA in Visual Arts program at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Forging Ahead

(17×24 cm, 204pp)

Bilingual, Hebrew and English

Bilingual exhibition catalogue for the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, for an exhibition featuring Israeli silversmiths David Heinz Gumbel and Ludwig Yehuda Wolpert and their Bauhaus-informed modernist style Judaica.

Book photography by Elie Posner.

Color Gone Wild

(19×26 cm, 136pp)

Bilingual, Hebrew and English

Exhibition catalogue for The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Book photography by Elie Posner.