Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland is part of a publication series named Writers in Residence commissioned by Alain de Botton and published by Visual Editions. Each one presents the story of a writer’s experience inside an organisation, accompanied by images from a Magnum photographer. The series was conceived as half-magazine, half book, and we worked with the words and images to add multiple layers to the storytelling. Each edition starts with the same basic design elements and adapts them to the story being told.

“For the third edition, Douglas Coupland whisks us away to France, Canada, China and the United States to learn about “a company you’ve most likely never heard of.” Intrigued yet? What if you also discovered that “were it to vanish tomorrow, our modern world would immediately be the worse for its absence”? I mean, he’s got me gripped with these lines, which are cleverly printed across the front cover.

Kitten Clone takes us inside Alcatel-Lucent – a company fundamental to the design, build and maintenance of the internet – past, present and future. It leads us down corridors of tangled cables to offices of neatly cubed work spaces, Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur’s camera dwelling on lamp-lit bookshelves and perky pot plants. Reassuringly closer to the size of a magazine than a paperback, Jeremy Leslie’s sophisticated design puts text and image on equal footing and renders both much more inviting.” — Words by Amy Lewin, It’s Nice That

CLIENT
Visual Editions / Alain de Botton

COLLABORATORS & CREDITS
Project completed at Magculture
Creative direction by Jeremy Leslie & Sophie Châtellier
Photography by Olivia Arthur
Published by Visual Editions