Tank Design captures Boston Marathon Bombing events in new book through iconography

Designers at the Cambridge-based design firm Tank have joined hands to create a book documenting the events of the Boston Marathon Bombing last April that tells the story in iconography.

“When you’re driving on a road and you’re seeing a sign that’s indicating slippery when wet, that communicates so quickly and essentially with only just a few elements of the drawing,” Tank senior director Elanie Blais said. “It’s the simplest language we have. It crosses all different language barriers that we have, so that is why we wanted to use iconography.”

The book “102 Hours” is being released Thursday during a free and public launch event hosted by AIGA Boston at Middlesex Lounge from 6 to 9 p.m. in Cambridge.

Profits made from the sale of the book will be donated to Boston non-profit Youth Design, which empowers urban creative urban youth to pursue a path to higher education by exposing them to the professional design community through workshops, internships and mentor programs.

Blais said donating the profit to Youth Design made sense for the design firm considering how young the two suspects Dzhonar Tsarnaev, then 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, then 26 and now deceased.

Blais explained that community-oriented and youth focused programs like Youth Design can help shape youth.

“I think whenever anything happens like that-an internal attack-whether it is a school shooting or the marathon bombing, it always come from a place where people feel rejected. They’re reacting to a community they don’t feel like cares about them” Blais said. “I think programs like Youth Design help strengthen our community. It opens up a circle of opportunity that can seem closed off to other people.”

The book is also available for purchase online at www.102hours.com.