How can you create a visual system that grounds readers in a rigorous and wide-ranging academic work? In collaboration with Professor Pacharee Sudhinaraset, Once–Future developed information design for her new book, Worlds at the End: Los Angeles, Infrastructure, and the Apocalyptic Imagination (Temple University Press, 2024). The book examines literary projects by writers of color at the turn of the twenty-first century who reimagined Los Angeles’s infrastructure through an apocalyptic aesthetic.

Once–Future Office incorporated Rob Sato’s artwork in the book’s cover design and developed chapter openers that invite readers into Professor Sudhinaraset’s nuanced analysis. Los Angeles is a central physical and psychic location in the book. Each chapter opens with a different map that literally and theoretically situates Los Angeles in relation to the specific landscape discussed in the chapter, grounding the reader in place. These graphics also contain gestures to key imagery described in the book, including waterways, highways, and the night sky. The visual language we developed evokes a complex interplay between hope and destruction, light and dark.