Designer Dominique Vine's type-heavy visualisation of dreams

Melbourne-based graphic designer Dominique Vine has gravitated towards the arts for as long as she can recall. Her years of creatively-minded projects is evident; Dominique’s portfolio is full of confident colour combinations, strong typefaces and considered compositions. “When I finished school I actually decided to enrol in a journalism degree,” Dominique tells It’s Nice That. “I regretted my decision very quickly, deferred after a semester and applied to communication design at Monash University instead. It was definitely one of the best decisions I’ve made. I finished my course last year but my love for design continues to grow.”

Dreams Archive is Dominique’s final university project, which chronicles the designer, her family and friends’ dreams over a series of satisfying spreads. “I stumbled across a podcast that was an archive of people recording their dreams as soon as they woke up. It was really interesting listening to these people recall their dreams, which are so personal and unique to each to them,” the 22-year old designer says. By playing with typography, format and materials, Dominique has produced an imaginative and comprehensive depiction of her subconscious mind. Dreams Archive is made up of 64 dreams, each of which has been interpreted through different fonts and colour palettes. In abstaining from incorporating imagery, Dreams Archive is a testament to the potential power of type.

“The typesetting and the actual format of the publication were really important to get right in order for the publication to engage the reader. Dreams are ephemeral by nature, they often don’t make sense and are usually really weird. The book required a layout and cataloguing system that would reflect the playfulness of dreams as well as offering the publication structure,” Dominique says. In order to create a strong framework, the designer decided on six overarching categories that the transcribed dreams could be arranged into and relegated each genre a specific colour scheme. The designer also used three different sizes of paper, which sees spreads overlap and bleed into each other, allowing the narratives to interact in unexpected ways. By using different paper dimensions, Dominique hands the reigns to the reader to form links between seemingly unrelated scenarios and, in so doing, mirrors the random stories we dream about.

Through Dreams Archive, Dominique looked to capture the extent to which dreams vary from person to person and to produce an efficient and comprehensive structure for a series of abstract, often nonsensical, narratives. “I drew a lot of inspiration from concrete poetry for this project. Concrete poetry is basically where the meaning of the poem is conveyed visually using the letters and words in an expressive way. Dreams Archive loosely interprets this concept. It challenged me typographically to create 64 layouts that were not only unique, but also representative of the dream’s story and meaning in some way.”