Use typography to create a series cover design for Faber Film’s range of books that reflects Faber and Faber’s long history of typographic excellence.
Considerations
- The Faber Film range of books covers a variety of genres and includes screenplays, technique guides and film history books.
- Faber and Faber will be offering this range for sale through the ‘Print on Demand’ service (PoD), which is exactly as it suggests, copies are made available on the basis of a single customer order.
- The cover designs should reflect the already high profile of Faber’s film list attracting both film enthusiasts and professionals alike.
I seem to have a natural affinity with book cover design. There is something about it that attracts, possibly the chance of the interplay between narrative and visual design. I originally wanted to tackle this brief using typographic visual puns playing on the title or subject matter of the book. However, on further investigating the existing faber Fiction Print on Demand series I began to deviate from this course and finally, perhaps, confuse myself. This existing series uses generative processing to create unique covers from a palette of decorative strokes. It also utilises a custom made typeface, a kind of modified version of the faber logotype. I wasn't sure whether the accompanying documents appear to allude to this a useful model for this brief. Anyway, I decided to experiment with film symbols that could be processed in a similar way. Although perhaps a little hackneyed, the great variety of shapes found in film spools was most interesting. Playing with these silhouette shapes began to produce some pleasing clean designs but in what way were they typographic solutions? There was little time for me to design a new and sympathetic typeface to support the designs, even if I knew how to begin to do that - which I don't really. Adam also opened a further field of ideas by skimming over what I'd achieved so far, suggesting that I should look more into processing and the language associated with film. I did experiment with this but the results seemed old hat, not very inspired and missing the mark for this genre of book.
The design has obviously gone through many incarnations and my personal favourite is the final shown here. I like the balance between the scale of the various elements and the way in which some advance and retreat according to their colour values. I think the overall effect is fresh, organic and clean. The idea is to produce each category of film book in a different colour theme. For the time being though I am putting this to rest while I concentrate on areas where ideas are flowing a little more successfully. My prefered design does not fulfil the typographic element of the brief and I see it as futile to continue at the moment.
