Guardian Review

We have been interested in Russian culture since visiting Moscow for an early Fuel project in 1992. We have recently designed and published two books about Russian culture, one featuring home-made household objects ( Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts by Vladimir Arkhipov) and the other on Russian criminal tattoos ( Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, Volume II by Danzig Baldaev). Dostoyevsky is one of the quintessential Russian writers, who asks all the big questions while laying his characters bare in the most readable way. The central character in Crime and Punishment , Raskolnikov, is constantly questioning both his psychological and physical boundaries. This is reflected in our approach to the "cover" - made from the same material as the inside stock, it is as fragile and open as the pages. The design echoes the tension and intensity of the writing, the back-cover optical illusion being a visual representation of Raskolnikov's battle with the voice of his conscience. The brown craft paper used through out the book gives a sense of the gritty St Petersburg locations and poverty that Dostoyevsky described. Russia itself has a major role in the book, and we wanted to remind readers of the book's original language by including the title and author in Cyrillic type as well as English. Caption: article-Penguin Classics.3 We have been interested in Russian culture since visiting Moscow for an early Fuel project in 1992. We have recently designed and published two books about Russian culture, one featuring home-made household objects ( Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts by Vladimir Arkhipov) and the other on Russian criminal tattoos ( Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, Volume II by Danzig Baldaev). - Stephen Sorrell, Damon Murray.