How we Designed Ilmatuga

a photography and prose poetry book by Viiu Härm. Best Literary Work Award of Estonian Literature Endowment in Free Award Category

“Viiu Härm’s Ilmatuga is a masterful piece of art that offers guidance to those of us rushing through everyday life — take your time, observe, read a paragraph, read it again, remember if you’ve experienced something similar. In this way, life can be balanced and beautiful, preserving nature, sustaining peace, with summer sunshine and winter’s cold — this is life. Harmony.”

Kai Olivia Arrak, Chair of the Cultural Endowment Jury

Backround & Challenges

When Viiu, a well-known writer and hobby photographer approached me to design a photography book for her 80th birthday, I realized immediately that this would be more than a typical layout project. Viiu had a large collection of Word documents and raw images capturing nature in various seasons. The texts varied significantly in length, and the photos came in different dimensions, making it challenging to combine them while still leaving enough room and air in the layout. Beyond photography, her writing offers deeper, poetic reflections on life. The task was to merge these diverse materials into a unified, visually appealing, and meaningful book.

Layout & Design

Rather than grouping the photos by season, I arranged them by color scheme and thematic resonance with the text. This allowed the images and text to complement each other organically. Some photographs appeared on a single page with text placed alongside, others filled entire spreads with minimal text. Some pages featured more substantial blocks of text, which required careful balancing to ensure a clean, airy layout that would still fit within a fixed page count. Unlikely pairings, such as a dog on a lava field and something that looks like burning ashes but is actually ice, made me especially happy.

Font Selection

Trueno for captions and headlines: Selected for its cleaner, more modern edge.

Lora, it provided a contrast that enhanced readability and visual appeal. for main text: Chosen for its readability and gentle, classic feel that complements poetic reflections.

Final Thoughts

Our collaboration is a good example of how people from different generations can work together and complement eachother. Viiu has been blogging for many years, sharing her photos and thoughts online and she's active on social media. Together, we've turned her blog posts into a book. But this project also highlights something important: books aren't the only form of media that deserve recognition. If we want people to keep reading in the future, we should start valuing other ways of sharing stories too like blogs and social media.

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