Christine's Design Blog

Print & Pattern
by Bowie Style
published by Laurence King Publishers

Saw this book at the Strand, and am in love! It’s going on The List of Things to Buy When I’m Rich. Or at least moderately well off.

I CANNOT stop reading this, but it’s 563 pages long and I’m a slow reader (if I accidentally skip a word, I have to go back and read the sentence again properly). Plus, there are so many characters and details to keep track of (some that you have to remember from the previous book), so I keep finding myself getting hung up on certain paragraphs. I usually don’t mind that I’m a slow reader, but staying up all night reading is apparently not conducive to job hunting.

But I’ve waited since last summer for the American edition of this book to come out. I was tempted to get the UK import from Amazon, but I could not, on good conscience, order a book with such a horrendous cover design. It’s definitely been worth the wait. Okay, back to reading…

Fresh off the Vimeo, the Oliver Jeffers CreativeMornings video! Makes me want to hug SwissMiss.

2010/04 Oliver Jeffers from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

In other news, Pratt Show installation happening today. Lugging my world and books up to 34th in a few hours’ time.

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.

Time for another break!

The day started early, but it started marvelously, because it was Swiss Miss’s CreativeMornings time again, and this time it was none other than my hero, Oliver Jeffers! This was very special for me because this is the tag I wore for the first CreativeMorning that I attended, which featured Michael Bierut. The tag read ‘If I could ask for a CreativeMorning speaker it would be:’

I suppose it wasn’t entirely fair that I wrote Oliver’s name, because I knew that Tina knew Oliver lives in Brooklyn when I wrote this. Ah well, no apologies for cheating.

Anyway, it was a lovely talk hosted at HarperCollins on the 9th floor. Oliver gave a funny presentation about his life and his work, many things that I’d known before, but also many interesting details that I was pleased to learn. I can’t wait until the video is up on the CreativeMornings site.

One piece of wisdom that I really liked was that he said in deciding to move out of Northern Ireland, he chose to take the bigger challenge by moving to New York, rather than London or anywhere ‘easier.’ He said that he tries to do this with many things, like going after the bigger publishing houses and working his way down from there, since it makes sense to try to go for where you want to end up. In other words, dream big and act big! I like. Here are some photos:

This is where he started, on Earth.

Much better photos can be found on the CreativeMornings Flickr page, one of which I stole here. I’m the one with the red coat hanging on the back of my chair. Is that what my hair really looks like from the back??

I owe Tina a huge thanks for adding me to the list after she’d already submitted it to the HarperCollins security people (they’re very strict with safety, it ain’t no joke!), so thanks Tina! Also thanks to Oliver for signing a book for a special friend and for always being so nice to me :)

Like many others, it was a great day to be in New York City.