“MIG – The City of Different Views” is a children’s interactive book and the diploma project of Vicheslava Tashkova. The project focuses on the theme of visual differences, depicting five visual conditions — scotoma, color blindness, low vision, blindness, and retinopathy - through illustrations, transparent overlays, typographic experiments, and defocusing effects.
The book introduces the concept of an imaginary city where each condition is associated with a different natural location - a lake, meadow, forest, cave, and mountain. This approach turns reading into a kind of journey, where each page adds a new layer to the story and simulates how the world changes depending on visual perception. Through the combination of graphic layers, color transformations, and typographic design, the reader is invited to experience a reality different from their own.
“The book is inspired by and dedicated to my sister, who is blind. I myself have a rather specific visual condition that I’ve never been able to explain properly to others. That’s why I decided to create a book that presents different visual states and their specificities. ‘MIG’ is not a book made for people with these visual impairments, but for everyone else - to let them glimpse through their eyes and see the world in different ways.”
- Vicheslava Tashkova
Vicheslava Tashkova is a young artist and illustrator from Burgas. This year, she completed her bachelor’s degree in Book, Illustration, and Printmaking at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia. For her, art is a way of communicating with the world, and her greatest inspiration is children’s illustration - a space where imagination is limitless and reality is seen through the pure and sincere gaze of children.
For the fourth consecutive year, the international design festival Melba includes the exhibition “Diploma Project” in its program. The series showcases selected graduation works by students from various disciplines — from sculpture and interactive design to illustration and fashion. The curatorial selection aims to highlight the diversity of approaches, media, and themes that engage the young generation of artists today. At the same time, the exhibition offers a glimpse into how these authors think about the future and what new ways they propose for understanding the world.
