One of the big projects I got to work on last year at Crown was the new coffee table book for the history of cocktails at Hilton hotels. I got to work alongside Lili Phillips, Senior Graphic Designer who used to work at Pentagram, and I learned a lot about editorial design and type. I was excited to bring that in a bit here.

The first thing I did was research typography. I had gone off that Outward Block font from the film poster exploration by this point, and I wanted to find something that really reflected the film and the iconography from it. What came to mind immediately was something resembling road signage. I explored numerous options and came across Roadway on DaFont (disclaimer: there was a lot of jokes about DaFont at OFFF in Barcelona, all of which ended in, “it’s kinda great though”).

Roadway is based on U.S. highway lettering observed on New York street signs, which is a core piece of design language and story in our film.

I was researching this as I had Dune: Exposures sitting next to me. One of my absolute favourite coffee table books. I thought, maybe I could use Roadway and do a type layout a little like this?

These were my first attempts. I used US Letter format, which Exposures uses. It’s a little unconventional, but I personally love how Letter looks. It’s more editorial and stands out a bit from the rest. A lot of smaller coffee table books take a similar format, and I wanted to give our art book that treatment.

The colours were a little random, so I went back and took stills from the film and started playing with colours from that.

One breakthrough was moving the ‘Com’ and the ‘Fort’ closer together to create a stronger hierarchy. My design friends had questioned this, and I’d discussed with them and agreed that splitting the text, alongside the “Zn” would create an interesting spin on the concept of the film: Charli’s comfort zone going awry.

I felt it was a little plain though, still I thought it would be nice to get something in the background. I had the idea to make a subtle painting/image based off of the film itself and overlaying it subtly. It started off more graphical…

…and then I brought it into Procreate and made it more painterly. I also added Charli on the balcony as an illustrative element.

I worked on design ideation in Figma, then rebuilt in InDesign for a proper CMYK Adobe print set-up with the appropriate bleed, margins and printer guidance.

For the page designs, I worked to an 8×8 grid with a 5mm gutter, and a 12mm bleed for printers. This kept everything nice and clear, with the focus on the artwork and content instead of the page design. I went with an off-white, neutral background colour to complement the more colourful cover, and also uplift the work.

I included a full-bleed, textless version of the poster as the opening page of the book:

I ended up replacing the right side with a Contents page.

For the forward, I took a note I wrote to myself at the beginning of the project. I think it sums up the “why” of the story well, and it’s also cool to see how we actually rose to that initial idea.

I have created 40+ solid pages right now, covering story, visual development for characters and environment, and environment creation. I would love to add some more detailed pages for lighting and even poster design before the EOYS. Now I have these page templates, it should be pretty easy to roll out some more when I’m given all the materials. Though, this still feels like a good highlights collection of our behind the scenes work!

I have until next week to print and receive before the end of May. I’m using Mixam (https://mixam.co.uk/) as they print US Letter in silk for a reasonable price, with quick delivery times.

NB: for all the character design concepts, Caity is going to give me them with transparent backgrounds to create a more seamless page design. We will have this for the EOYS/print!

Also, font licenses are not final and not yet permittable to be used for commercial reasons. It’s unlikely we’ll need them to be, but I will be very cautious on legalities here before sending for print, and make sure we’re covered.

Table Display

For the table display, Caity had the idea of ordering miniature toys for roadworks, and that was the majority vote. The following is our set-up which we put together on Thursday 15th May.

The art book, alongside my business card and CV will be there by EOYS!