16th April, 2022 was the 133rd birthday of the world’s most beloved performer: Sir Charlie Chaplin. But this occasion follows two years of great loss and grief, where humankind had begun to lose belief.

While we’d celebrated Charlie’s life and craft on numerous occasions, we felt he had something more to offer to the world now: resilience. Because although he’d endured a lion’s share of life’s tragedies himself, he had the strength to look past them and put smiles on faces where there were none.

We wanted to capture this story in a piece of art: a one-of-a-kind book narrating Chaplin’s tragic tale in its pages, coming together to form a whole much larger than the sum of its parts. A metaphor for his life, if there ever was one. Commissioned by the Charlie Chaplin Museum Foundation, this book (A Silent Frown) sought to bring hope and faith to all.

None.

Titled A Silent Frown, we designed a book whose every page had a transparent section with line art illustrations depicting a grueling chapter of Sir Chaplin’s life. When the reader flips through the book and stacks the pages together, the drawings all come together to form the visage of the legend.

A key illustration challenge was to ensure that each line drawing stands alone, independently conveying a slice of Chaplin’s story, while also contributing to the larger visual effort. The art had to be carefully crafted and sequenced, so that they illustrations would achieve the ideal dark tones, middle tones, and highlights of Chaplin’s face when stacked together. This task was further complicated by the need to establish chronology in the story.

A precise production process was then used, marrying traditional screen printing on thin, anti-scratch acrylic sheets with an amalgamation of die-cut and flat-lay book binding.