Award-winning design that transforms polar exploration into an immersive, tactile experience.

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Out in the Cold is an immersive fine-art edition that transforms thirty years of polar exploration into a spatial and material narrative. Commissioned by photographer Danie Ferreira, the project translates the brutal clarity of the Arctic and Antarctic into a dual-volume work. Housed in a bespoke presentation box screen-printed in iridescent inks, the edition reflects the mutable luminosity of ice – catching and dispersing light like the polar sky. Inside sit a pair of hand-bound books – North and South – their interiors structured to evoke the vastness, fragility, and rhythmic quiet of frozen terrains.

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The design is led by material intuition: silver dupion silk binding echoes the grain of wind-scored snow; hand-painted silver edges form a solid reflective block that dissolves on opening; translucent interleaves offer shifting layers of visibility, as though moving through snow drifts or fog. These gestures are not decorative but elemental – strategies to mirror environmental conditions through print.

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Typographic restraint and asymmetrical grid systems guide the reader across full-bleed panoramas and intimate frames – moments of wildlife, weather, and solitude held in tension. Negative space is employed not as background, but as atmosphere: a field of silence that amplifies presence and scale. Sparse foil-blocked accents and carefully selected iridescent papers subtly embed geographical context, enhancing the tactile experience without disrupting the visual flow. Crucially, this is not just a document of travel, but an edition that has itself travelled. In each book there are pages that were physically carried to the North and South Poles, signed and stamped in situ before binding. These interventions ground the object in the terrain it depicts – marking it as witness, not merely archive.

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Out in the Cold won both Book of the Year and Best British Book at the 2023 BBD&PA Awards. It stands as a testament to what can be achieved when editorial design becomes a mode of storytelling equal to image and text: immersive, conceptual, and exacting. A collector’s edition in the truest sense – an experience of polar space through structure, rhythm, and light.

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Artist: Danie Ferreira 

Art Direction: BIllie Temple

Design & Layout: BIllie Temple, Karmen van Rensburg, Agatha Smith

Publisher: Hurtwood Books