Milkman

Publication Design

For Type III with Pouya Ahmadi

Publication created from Cao Fei’s Milkman (2005) that seeks to translate the look, atmosphere, and experience of watching the film into publication form. Milkman is a pseudo-documentary fiction exploring the mundane realities and escapist fantasies of the working class in China.

In Milkman, the dialogue is often unrelated to what one sees. To evoke this disconnect between thought and experience, the dialogue is separated onto vellum inserts between full-bleed screencap spreads, creating a gauzy effect where image and type overlap but never fully combine—where one is always a ghost to the other.

The sudden dream sequence, where the main character imagines himself carefree and wealthy, takes on a different form entirely: printed on yellow vellum and in accordian book form, the text weaves in and out of legibility as it merges directly with image and surface.