Filed next to the Whole Earth Catalog.

Overview
Hiraku Ogura’s Fermentation Cultural Anthropology (発酵文化人類学) began as a popular column in Sotokoto magazine before Kirakusha turned it into a book. We designed it.

Question
Where does this book belong?

Challenge
Fermentation is alive. It bubbles, it smells, it changes over time. Paper doesn’t. The design had to bring some of that life to the page.

Approach
We started by picturing the book’s home: a bookshelf in a hippie house in Oregon, right next to the Whole Earth Catalog. The picture came from our creative director Woody Udagawa’s own stays in houses like that in the early days of Airbnb and Couchsurfing, one in particular full of permaculture-inspired odds and ends.

From there, fermentation found its way into everything. The cover paper is rough, like something left to ferment. The English title is a pattern made from photographs of miso. The inner cover is miso-colored, with a line in French that echoes the first chapter.

We made several covers, and the author’s community voted for the one that made it.

Outcome
A book about fermentation that feels a little alive itself. And a cover its readers picked.