Editorial Design For Von Calhau’s The Rhetorical Rat
This book ends with a labyrinth, not an index.
This project presents the editorial design for Von Calhau’s publication 'The Rhetorical Rat'. The design explores experimental typographic layouts and visual rhythm to reflect the duo’s avant-garde artistic language.
Insights
- The main point is the book’s experimental editorial structure: it refuses a normal ending and instead closes with an index of "dissolutions" that acts like a labyrinth, keeping Von Calhau!’s game open.
- Maria João Macedo designed the 232-page A4 softcover in close collaboration with the duo Marta Ângela and João Alves, using deliberately low reference points like old coloring books and school exercise books to frame the publication's concept.
- The layout exploits transparency and symmetry so recto and verso are read against each other, while the fore-edge becomes a designed surface that reveals a hidden text as an anamorphosis when the book is closed.
- The publication gathers drawings, riddles, language games, ambigrams, and continuous texts, matching Von Calhau!’s cross-disciplinary practice across film, print, music, and performance.
- Credits vary across sources: Culturgest lists the graphic design under “M.ª João Macedo,” while PO.EX credits “Studio Maria João Macedo,” a useful detail since the project predates the 2018 founding of Macedo Cannatà.
