VINTAGE LOVES FILM

While looking on VINTAGE's website I stumbled upon something called Vintage Loves Film. Looking through it is similar to what I am doing, due to the fact it is picking novels that turned into huge films, but re-designing the book for it.


Here is the information all about the design project taken on by Vintage.

The ‘Vintage Loves Film’ series is a one-off Summer Promotion to highlight ten Vintage bestsellers whose films also became box-office successes. For the consumer who may have seen the film but not read the book, we would be offering a fresh way of viewing these literary classics. This presented the design team with a difficult problem – how to tie the concept of film and book together. We particularly wanted to avoid a film tie-in approach, or work with film stills – the visual conceit would lie in how we described the transition of typed word to spoken word.

It occurred that quotes would be the way forward for a number of reasons:

1 – Most film fanatics can quote lines from their favourite films. For instance, we may not have seen, or know the story to the film Casablanca, but we remember the lines – ‘Here's looking at you, kid,’ ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’ , and even the misquote – ‘Play it again, Sam...’

2 – We use quotes from critics to help sell books, so why not use a quote from the book to sell itself?

We made a point of selecting quotes that were relevant to both film and book whilst making sure we remained faithful to the wording of the novel. The author name and title were relegated to the spine so that the quotes would be read as the description of the book, and not as typographic window dressing. Our insistence to work only with quotes and forego the usual trade conventions was initially met with some concerns, but the positive reactions from authors and estates alike confirmed that it was a bold, but correct approach.

Each designer took on two titles apiece, with the idea of choosing a type solution that would reflect the period or feel of the film (see below) and to complete the film connection we numbered the series with a motif inspired by the ten-to-one celluloid countdown on old black and white movies.

The simple cover concept needed to be complemented by the production values, so we printed in two colour (black and PMS485) on a pearlescent stock (Curious Metallic Virtual Pearl) with the bookblock edges dipped in black.

-----

Fight Club takes its inspiration from 1990’s experimental ‘grunge’ typesetting. The subversive design and misplaced O echo the novel’s anarchic nature.

Why use anything other than Helvetica for Trainspotting? – a typeface going through a much-welcomed renaissance in the 1990s.

The highlighting of the final line being an ironic nod to the novel’s subject matter.

Death in Venice interprets renaissance typesetting with a twist – the idea of something once-grand slowly fading away. Individual T’s become crosses as a forewarning of the inevitability of death, an odd contradiction to the enlightenment of the quote.

The concept behind the ideas are good, linking quotes of the story into the design of the books is a really good idea. I have picked out Fight Club as I am doing Fight Club and also Trainspotting because it as well is a Trangressive fiction.

Executed well, it is exactly the type of work I like, due to the heavy use of type. It is a very different take on the book covers to what I have and am thinking and I do really like what has been done but I am trying to get across something different, but still could use this as inspiration to the rest of the brief.