D&AD

As part of the PPRD unit this year, we have to enter one of the D&AD competition briefs. I decided to do the Faber&Faber brief which is to design 3 book covers for their film books.

The brief
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.
Target Audience
Film professionals Film and media students People looking for a special gift for a film enthusiast
Mandatory requirements
- ‘Faber Film’ and the faber Logo as a discreet but integral part of the design - A series identity that works well in print and online - A minimum of 3 covers chosen from the titles in the supporting documents differentiated by colour or layout - The design should be adaptable across two sizes. B format which is 126mm width x 129mm height (like a standard paperback) and the larger demy format 135mm width x 216mm height.

This was the most relevant brief to what i want to do when i finish the course. It isn't perfect but it was better than all the others. I started off very slowly and still to this date i am still moving at a slow rate. It hasn't been at the top of my priorities and to be honest, it still isn't. I did however, get a few ideas started but i was mainly focusing on how each book would be linked in a series. I looked at a lot of other series of books that are available from other publishers such as penguin, virgin books and wallflower press. Each of them all have their own style and all have a way of linking each book in a series.


From this i made started to develop my own ligatures. I think they were alright but i wasn't putting much thought into them which meant they weren't being developed very well or quick.


A few weeks into starting the brief, I decided to join together with Luke and Dave who i had done the DBA logo with previously. We had all chosen to do this brief and were all going along slightly different routes and we thought that working together would give us all a better chance to get some solid ideas done before the hand in. We all had slightly different ideas and we tried to combine them to create a series. After a talk with a guest tutor, Catell Ronca, we decided to scrap all the seperate ideas and came up with a concept of making them a lot more simple. Watch this space!