LEO MILANO
The printed book lying on black, seen from the fore-edge: the colour-strip cover and the title «Цвета Камчатского Края».

Design · Editorial

Colours of Kamchatka

Цвета Камчатского Края

A 148-page visual study that turns three Kamchatka landscapes into palettes, hex codes and colour spaces

I took photographs of three places in Kamchatka, the Valley of Geysers, Kronotsky Lake and Bering Island, and read them only as colour. Every photo becomes a palette, every palette gets a name and its hex codes, and each part of the book ends in a colour space where the whole landscape is stretched into stripes.

Year
2025
Role
Concept, colour analysis, writing, layout
Tools
Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop

The book reads the landscape the way a colour picker does, but slowly.

Brief

A visual study of colour in nature: an editorial book about the colours of Kamchatka. 148 pages, 153 × 231 mm, hardcover.

Hands holding the contents spread: Долина гейзеров, Кроноцкое озеро, Остров Беринга.
Hands holding a palette page, «Золотисто-бежевые оттенки», with its hex codes.

Idea

Each place has a character, and the character is in its colours.

The Valley of Geysers is the living heart of Kamchatka, where the earth breathes steam: grey fog, yellow and rust-red mineral crusts, clear water in the craters, turquoise pools. Kronotsky Lake is a mirror of old volcanoes: cold blues, muted grey-green slopes, dark volcanic stone and gold on the water. Bering Island is a lonely guard of the Pacific: silver-grey cliffs under moss, copper light on bare rock, smoky silhouettes of seabirds in the fog.

The book reads the landscape the way a colour picker does, but slowly.

Spread with a photograph of the Valley of Geysers, steam rising from a river valley, with a block of extracted colour swatches in the middle.

Process

For each place I chose a few photographs and pulled a palette out of each one. Then every group of colours got a page of its own: a name (“golden-brown”, “deep blue”, “ashen dark”), a short text about where those colours come from, the hex codes set large, and a strip of the colours running down the edge of the page.

At the end of each part, the palettes are stretched into a colour space, and the photographs are pushed through them until the landscape turns into texture. I did this by hand, simplifying each image and extracting its colours, not by running it through a filter.

Three steps side by side: a photo of ducks over Kronotsky Lake at dusk, the book spread with its extracted palette bars, and the Kronotsky colour space of vertical stripes.
Three steps side by side: the Valley of Geysers photo with its palette, the spread with the palette bars, and the geyser colour space of vertical stripes.
Hands holding the Kronotsky Lake photo spread: mountains, water and birds in flight.
The Kronotsky Lake colour-space spread, the book angled on black.
Hands holding a palette spread of blue and gold strips with hex codes.
A hand holding the «Долина Гейзеров» chapter opener with a thermal abstract.
Valley of Geysers
The «Кроноцкое озеро» chapter opener, pages fanned on black.
Kronotsky Lake

Result

A printed book of 148 pages in three parts, each ending in its own colour space.

Spread of vertical stripes in slate blue, gold, peach and grey, titled Цветовое пространство Кроноцкого озера, next to a recoloured snowy mountain.
Spread of vertical stripes in olive, grey, gold and lilac, titled Цветовое пространство острова Беринга.

Credits

  • Photographs: Igor Shpilenok (shpilenok.ru) and Maria Makurochkina (mariam.rasfokus.ru), as credited in the book; colour analysis and recolouring by me
  • Typefaces: Ferro Grotesk, Liter

HSE Art and Design School, BA Communication Design