Christine's Design Blog

Inspired by:

Also influenced by listening to the Across the Universe soundtrack while drawing.

Oh, to have a safe home for my drawings and large-ish prints! And a room that can fit that home.

Phileas Fogg Travel Guides

I am so excited to share this project with you! For our last project in Graphic Design II, our teacher Anne Fink let us choose our own projects. I knew that I wanted to do something with branding and book covers, and decided to think back to my summer internship at Fodor’s and my recent trip to London for inspiration.

Traveling is wonderful, and having the proper resources is wonderful, too. What gets me is that having a travel guide out as you stand on a street corner poring over it is kind of a dead giveaway that you’re a tourist.

So I decided that I would design travel guides that are disguised as novels. The books are 4.25×7 in size, standard mass market size, and concentrate on single cities to keep them pretty portable. The books are branded as ‘Fogg Books,’ after the main character in Jules Verne‘s Around the World in 80 Days. The covers are designed with a title to fool people into thinking that you’re reading Episodes in Sydney written by some guy named Phileas Fogg, rather than a travel guide about Sydney.

Upon purchase, the books come with half-jackets that tell you what’s really going on, and how to use it, and when you travel, you simply remove the jacket. Now you’ll look bookish and be well-informed.

These are some photos that I hurriedly took right after assembling the comps the day Pratt Show submissions were due. Better photos will come once I’ve got them back. Hopefully they’ll make it into the show!

I had such fun hand-lettering these!

I wrote fake descriptions and reviews on the backs — all the reviewers were journalists from other Jules Verne novels. These names are explained on the inside flap of the jacket, which I didn’t get a photo of.

When you have the books on your shelf, you’re supposed to have a nice little skyline of famous monuments running across the spines.

Originally, I’d planned to take the project further, but ended up running out of time. If I get a chance after graduation, I want to flesh the books out with maps and inside page designs. My idea was that the books wouldn’t have loud, blaring color photography that would give you away as soon as the book’s open, but to have black and white photos treated like illustrations or photos in regular novels. I haven’t yet figured out how I would comp that up, though — for now, these books are Studio Tac’ed onto three Ernest Hemingway books I bought at the Strand, because they happened to be the right size. Comping suggestions and feedback welcome!

But in other news — HURRAY, Pratt Show madness is over! Just one more week of classes and finishing up projects, as well as getting ready for the show, and I’ll be spat out into the big bad world.