Victor Hugo

"To err is human. To loaf is Parisian."

- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Victor Hugo had a very distinctive writing style. Best known for his novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (some English translations call it The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), but also the author of The Man Who Laughs, 93, The Toilers of the Sea, along with other novels and poems, I have found it useful to have a pad of paper and pen handy when reading his works. He often inserts a random statement in the middle of a narrative that is quite thought-provoking. He also spends whole chapters discussing concepts that may or may not be relevant to the story (I find reading the abridged version first is helpful, and then I can go back and read the full version).

Victor Hugo
Steven Sauke
Text-Based Illustration

One such random statement in Les Misérables is his observation when introducing the students who will figure prominently, "To err is human. To loaf is Parisian." Reading that made me burst out laughing.

One assignment in one of my design classes was to select a quote from an author and make a text-based portrait in Adobe Illustrator using the words of the quote. After narrowing it down, I selected this quote from Hugo. This was perhaps the most tedious assignment, particularly since my computer crashed at one point, causing me to lose hours of work. But I was very proud of the result.