The Visual Language of Our Covers

Every Reflexivity Press cover is divided in two. The lower half carries the title, the author and the sign of the edition. The upper half shows a graphic developed from that sign, which indicates where the book stands within its body of work. The sign follows the edition, not the author: a book by Kai Froeb in the Johannes Heinrichs Edition bears the rhombus. The graphics are generated from the catalogue data, not designed freely. The same position yields the same image.

Hegel Interpretations Edition: the triangle

The sign of this edition is the triangle of hegel.net: an upright triangle into which an inverted one is set so that its corners meet the midpoints of the sides. It thus falls into four equal triangles, and each of them can be divided again in the same way.

In this way it reflects the structure of Hegel’s system. The whole triangle is the system. At the bottom left stands the Logic, at the bottom right Nature, at the top Spirit. Within the triangle of Spirit the division repeats itself: subjective Spirit at the bottom left, objective Spirit at the bottom right, absolute Spirit at the top.

The cover highlights the part the book deals with, as the sign itself does: the filled middle triangle together with the triangle that encloses it. A commentary on the Logic shows the lower left triangle; a book on subjective Spirit shows the lower left triangle within the upper one. Books on the system as a whole show the whole triangle.

Johannes Heinrichs Edition: the rhombus

The sign of this edition is Johannes Heinrichs’ rhombus: four nested rhombuses in the colours of the four elements of meaning in his reflection system theory. Yellow stands for the It, red for the I, blue for the You, violet for the medium.

On the cover the rhombus is divided internally into four equal fields: at the bottom the It or object, on the left the I, on the right the You and the social, at the top the medium, that which encompasses. The field to which the book belongs is filled. Because Heinrichs’ work divides fourfold again at every level, a field can itself be divided into four fields; the higher-level field then remains filled in a paler shade. Within the social, for instance, stand economy, politics, culture and values.

Semiotics has a position of its own. For its books the whole rhombus is semiotics and is outlined in red, because Heinrichs assigns it to the I. Its fields then mean action (bottom), language (left), art (right) and mysticism (top). The five volumes on language bear a second red frame, for with them the whole rhombus is language; the filled field shows the dimension of the volume. Volumes 4 and 5 share the upper field and differ in hue.

Works on the whole and the books about Johannes Heinrichs show the upper field, the medium. The Cosmic Kaleidoscope fills all four fields at once.

Kai Froeb Edition: the KAI sign

The sign consists of three strokes: a vertical stroke with a dot and two arms that start from a common point. Together they form a k, a reclining a and an i.

The three strokes stand for the three foundational books. The lower arm is truth, the foundation. The upper arm is action, which goes beyond it. Both spring from one point, because knowing and acting have a common root. The vertical stroke is thinking. It crosses both arms, because thinking shapes the knowing of truth as much as it shapes action. Its dot is the I that thinks.

On the foundational books the whole sign is visible and only the book’s own stroke is strengthened, for each of them is a moment of the same whole. On the other books only the stroke on which they build stands out: the critique of astrology with truth, the birth of multiplication with thinking, the essay on football with action.

The colours

The lower half of every cover has the same light ground. At the top the background colour distinguishes the editions: violet for the Johannes Heinrichs Edition, blue for the Hegel Interpretations, anthracite for the Kai Froeb Edition.

This text is published under the Zero Marginal Cost License v1.3.