My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
—first line of Great Expectations
Seventy graphic designers and typographers have created what they imagine the first page of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations would look like today if it were printed by a contempory publishing company. The results (although a little hard to see here, unfortunately) are often surprising, funny or beautiful.
The project is an attempt to show the possibilities of typography and design in a printed book. “We’ve been interested, for some time, in exploring how type and layout affect the way we read and the assumptions a reader makes when they first see a page,” graphic designer Lucienne Roberts, the instigator of the project, told The Atlantic. “Many people read novels, but the influence of the typesetting and layout is arguably invisible to most.”
