Our team thought long and hard about how to bring Igneus Press forward into tomorrow: a bright new legacy, connecting our stable of poets with writers we haven’t met yet – maybe haven’t even been born yet. How do you demonstrate yourself as a steely link in a very long chain?
We interviewed influencers, social media experts, and web designers, looking for the best way to intersect a fast-moving digital world with an art form once written in ink and silk. What about all the romance and mystery in between? Poetry is a growing, thriving tree made out of old typewriters, bamboo slips, dirty notebooks and mason jars adventitiously clinging to brick and mortar walls, attaching also to strings of ones and zeroes. How do we convey all of that on a tidy plate to be passed around parlors and city bus stops? How does poetry meet people where they are?
We settled on our little robot guy seated at a manual typewriter. Many of us still revel in that click-click of an old Underwood, don’t we? And then there’s the weird-cricket sound of dial-up modem (AOL is finally retiring that software.) We created him in solid black lines to recall the smell of wet ink on a page. We imagine the rough feel of a wooden table, the impact of metal fingers on metal keys. We like the cognitive dissonance of square head and body with round joints and features.
We think this little logo encapsulates the expanse within Igneus Press: past, present, and future, reaching in all directions at once.
The rest of the website was carefully chosen to represent the vastness of poetry and the Igneus vibe: clean, crisp, with rows and rows and rows of books. A natural but still vibrant palette. Accessible.
Please go stroll around https://igneuspress.com and tell us what you think: What’s pleasurable? What doesn’t work the way you expected? Was that surprise exciting or disappointing?
We’d love to hear from you.
