the story of saudade

About The Project

The Story of Saudade is a bilingual, experimental typographic book that explores the meaning, history, literature, and music surrounding the word saudade. It is untranslatable to English but can roughly be described as an aching, longing feeling for someone or something that is gone and will never return. It can pertain to an object or person from your past or a future that has never happened yet. It originates during the Great Discoveries in Portugal where husbands would go out to sea and never return, leaving their wives and families feeling saudade. It’s a significant part of the Portuguese and Brazilian temperament, so I wanted to capture that with every element of this book.

I conveyed the feeling and history of saudade through materiality, color, and typography. The book cover is made of plywood and stained to look similar to the color of old Portuguese ships. The typefaces I utilized are Portuguesa and Loretta. Loretta was the typeface I chose which was used primarily for the body text. It was created by a Portuguese type foundry and complimented my other typefaces well. Portuguesa has an all-caps font, a script font, and an icon font. The icons are incredibly similar to some of the elements utilized in the signature blue tiles of Portugal, so I pulled those elements into the book and used color to help showcase the transition between happy and sad emotions, two emotions that very heavily encompass the relationship the Portuguese have with saudade. The icons can also be seen on the front and back cover of the book. The colors I chose are a variety of blues and yellows to represent those emotions conveyed through the tiles and the text.

I loved this project because it helped enhance my skills with experimental typography and bookbinding. Before this, I had never been able to bind a book successfully before. I also had never created a book that only uses typography as image, so this was a super exciting project for me and I’m incredibly happy with the results.

Pine plywood cover
Text weight paper
# of pages
9.5” x 9.5”