*Random*

I got tagged in a pic on facebook that came with the following message;

You've been tagged! now follow these instructions...
1 - click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 - click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 - click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.
5 - Post it to FB with these instructions and tag the friends you want to join in.

And this is what i came up with;You should try it, it's genius. Just follow the instructions above. Doooooo it! x

Penguin Elective

"The past is always tense, the future perfect"
- Zadie Smith

For this project we collaborated with a student on our course we didn't know, with the brief of designing a book cover for Penguin Books. We chose White Teeth by Zadie Smith. If you haven't already read it; do! I was lucky enough to be paired with an illustrator, so i focused on the type while she focused on the image...


We decided early on that we wanted to portray a sense of urban dilapidation in our imagery, because this reflects not only the character's surroundings (of a glum 1970s Willesden) but also the way they become run-down themselves by the hardships of their troubled lives.
We became really interested in 70s wallpaper, as it reflects the time and place that the book is set in, aswell as hinting at the "psychedelic" nature of the characters lives...Then we fused all our ideas so far into a big layered bundle of screen-printed experiments...
...from which we developed our work into some well considered final outcomes...

My favourite part of our design is the "white teeth" type, as it refers to the character Clara's front teeth being knocked out, and is a symbolic metaphor used throughout the book.
"Now young men shouldn't tell fibs, you see? Fibs will make your teeth rot..."
- Zadie Smith, White Teeth.

The word "teeth" appears 77 times in the book.

Larger than life...

On our first day as typo students, we were whisked off to the beach for a bit of inspiration - these are some of the photos i took in Dungeness...You can take the student out of the typo studio...Well, its kind-of type...To be fair, it was very well done!