The Hours

Fall 2025
InDesign

This is a set of broadsides advertising the book The Hours by Michael Cunningham. The Hours is a tribute to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. We follow Virginia Woolf herself as she writes this book, and two other women in different historical contexts, all united by their connection to Mrs Dalloway.

To show the three intertwining narratives, I highlight a passage from each main character. The large quote reveals the women’s shared suicidal ideation and sets the tone for the close reading of the other passages which ponder the visceral beauty of life. This mirrors the reading experience of The Hours, which starts out by depicting Woolf’s suicide.

The Closeups

Closeup of 1st broadside

Closeup of 2nd broadside

Closeup of 3rd broadside

Closeup of 3rd broadside

The Process

The typeface chosen for the broadsides, LTC Caslon Pro, is derived from first edition prints of Virginia Woolf’s books.

Initial sketches

I decided to move forward with the second sketch because of the hierarchy between a far away read and a close reading experience. In my next iterations I wanted to be more mindful about where I broke up the text.

I moved away from having a gradient in the background because it was too on the nose.

I added more space between “She could decide to die” and “It is an abstract,” to better group the beginning of the second sentence with its end. I also made the leading in “Hotel rooms are where people do things like that, aren’t they?” uniform. Before, I varied the line spacing to show the emotional intensity of the sentence, but the closer, uniform spacing achieves this better.

I also added the women’s names to their respective quotes because I wanted to emphasize the three separate narratives.

I chose the alignment of each smaller passage to intentionally create rhythm in the composition. First, the two smaller passages and the title and author of the book are equidistant from the edge of each poster creating a system.

Second, Woolf’s passage on the first broadside aligns with the middle of the x height of “shimmering”. Clarissa Vaughan’s passage on the third broadside is in the middle of the space between “to die” and “notion” and aligns with the top of “abstract”. Laura Brown’s credit aligns with the left edge of “die”. I found this was more dynamic than aligning the passages to the cap heights of the large quote.

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Adel Cynolter