Beginning to End - Dark Factory: Design, Tricia Reeks
Dark Factory is Kathe Koja’s wholly original “immersive” novel that combines her award-winning writing and her skill directing immersive events, to create a story that unfolds on the page, online, and in the reader's creative mind.
A near-future dance club, Dark Factory is three floors of DJs, drinks, and customizable reality, everything you see and hear and feel. Ari Regon is the club’s wild card floor manager and Max Caspar is a stubborn DIY artist, both chasing their own vision of true reality. Rogue journalist Marfa Carpenter is there to write it all down. Then a rooftop rave sets in motion a fathomless energy that may drive Ari and Max to the edge of the ultimate experience.
Meerkat Press released Dark Factory on May 22, and will follow up with Dark Park, in 2023. For our next Beginning to End*, Spine follows the project through author, agent, publicity, and design.
*And since the project hasn’t actually “ended” (thus the asterisk) we’ll finish with a creative collaborator bringing a version of Dark Park to virtual reality in 2023.
Next up: Creative Collaborator, AV/VR Design of Dark Park, Charlie Athanas.
Kathe Koja’s Dark Factory is a designer’s dream come true. So much opportunity from the book cover to the book design to the website to the merchandise and everything in between. As a writer, Kathe Koja has one of the most unique styles of anyone I’ve read. If there is one word in the many reviews that captures it for me, it is “propulsive.” Drop that into the setting of the club scene and you’ve got the perfect recipe for high energy fun.
Long before I even knew about Dark Factory, she’d been sharing her ideas on her Patreon page, and along the way, various creatives had created art for the project. There were club posters, tattoo designs, and more—a custom designed Dark Factory mood board! But it was more than that as some of the designs made it into the book, and all of them are featured at DarkFactory.club. One of the artists, Sofia Ajram, designed jewelry that grand prize winners of the mask contest and the fan art contest received. Words from the book flow across the face of a stunning custom designed pendant.
The official design process started with high level branding. A key theme throughout the project is fun, and we set out to capture that with colors and fonts used for the logo, which appears on the website, the book cover, and on merchandise. The image of the dancer on the cover was a stock photo that resonated deeply with us and seemed to embody the “everyperson” of the Dark Factory club scene. A horned mask is also a key element of the book, but on the cover, the horns appear to be a part of the dancer—like the project itself, the line between mask and reality has been erased. Add the swish of color, movement, and smoke, and you have a cover that captures the energy of the club scene and of the author’s writing style! The dancer also has their own paper doll set (with multiple club outfits) that was part of the publicity and preorder package.
In addition to the main story line, there is bonus content that brings yet another layer of depth to the narrative, so we knew the print book design was going to be particularly important. Articles, character vignettes, and realistic photo composites continue to chip away at the lines between the story and reality. It has to be real if there is a photo of it happening, right? But how to get all of this into a print format that would work for every style of reading? We knew some readers would want to get the bonus material as they read the main narrative, others would not. So we went with a journalistic presentation, using more of a magazine layout as our guide. The bonus content appears throughout the book, but it is easily identified as extra. You can read as you go, come back to it at the end, or ignore it altogether.
Where Dark Factory is a commercial dance club, Dark Park is an outside, organic venue, so like the narrative, the aesthetic is evolving, and we can’t wait for readers to see what’s coming in 2023, with the book and the virtual reality version of Dark Park.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.