Wednesday 14 April 2010

some calligraphy covers of mine


Since I have put calligraphy as one of the main topics for this blog I thought it was about time I actually did a piece about it, so here goes:

Being a huge fan of calligraphy since my early teens, when a fantastic art teacher introduced it to me, I've been fortunate enough to do a few commercial assignments. Being asked to do cover lettering for Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway has been the most honourable job yet: simpy cos that movie IS calligraphy. It's visually the most beautifully stunning amazing movie ever! In this case I made most of the text for the back- and insides as well, but for Draughtman's Contract, below, it's just the title that's mine. I really like the font for the other text though, so I don't mind.


These dvd covers are from Atlantic Film, a Swedish movie distributor nowadays well known for their beautiful design of covers, as well as doing a lot of excellent classic and art movies. The art direction of these particular covers is made by my older brother, a very talented designer indeed.



This cover is for sure the most widely spread anything I've ever done, with around 150.000 copies hardback, and 30.000 paperback sold in Sweden (have no idea what it's sold in Norway, where they used the same cover). I do work for the publisher, but it was the designer Niklas Lindblad who asked if I wanted to try something since we had a hard time agreeing on a font that would work. With Niklas' genius mind I think it turned out wonderfully, so striking and unusual for a thriller. A little side story: when the book came out, I got another very fun assignment to design a window display in a book store downtown Stockholm. I volunteered cos I've got so much of Chinese things around the house! So I used mainly my own things, and got a few other small things, and it all turned out so well the store kept it for about 2 months instead of the agreed 2 weeks.



These covers are for the two first books in Jasper Fforde's series about Thursday Next, hilarious sort of literary detective stories, with a lot of twists and winks to literary history. My very talented friend Simon Stålenhag did the great art work for them, and I like them a lot.


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