From the cover, a sculpted portrait of Ed van Hinte (1951), a design journalist, stares at you with wide-open eyes as a sepsis patient. He was sick, and not just a little.
But fortunately, Van Hinte is one of the 50,000 survivors out of 60,000 people who contracted sepsis, a potentially fatal immune disorder leading to self-poisoning. Dazed, he surrendered to the whims of the disease. What else could he do?
As he recovers, Van Hinte regains a sense of control as he jots down what is happening to him on a laptop. After his recovery, Van Hinte compiled the poignant, shocking, and humorous accounts of his illness into a beautiful illustrated book. The intuitive and uninhibited drawings by Fynn van der Ziel and the dynamic typography and book design by Céline Hurka and Rudi van Delden guide you through the ups and downs of being very ill and the journey to recovery.
Bedtime stories
What stands out is the Swiss binding, a cover with one open side, allowing the sections to lie flat. This makes it easy to read the book in bed (…). In his narrative, Van Hinte shifts through the passage of time and between feelings of madness and understanding, hope and HORROR (for which he warns the reader only afterward!) 112, Gedver, Overdracht, Veilig, and AAUU blare as capital letters across the spreads. The Tonka typeface by Hurka and Huw Williams was used for this. In the text blocks, Hurka van Van Delden employs the effective attention-grabbing technique of accented words, such as on the “Privé” page.
Van der Ziel provides a counterpoint with deliberately clumsy yet unvarnished portraits, interspersed with mood boards as the patient, recovering from painful bladder irrigations, drifts back into the twilight zone between wakefulness and slumber. Pastel hues—delicate light blue, blood brown, Naples yellow, nightmare purple, hopeful orange—ultimately guide you toward a happy ending.
This potential Best Designed Book also deserves an award as an inventively designed medical history.
Ziek is published by Uitgeverij Komma
Learn more about symptoms at sepsisnederland.nl
Text: Chris Reinewald
