The task was to design a book from front to back. I chose Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, a humorous sci fi mystery by Douglas Adams. When redesigning it, I wanted to capture some of the fun energy as well as the more brooding mysteriousness and formality of England in the 1980s. I went with a traditional typeface of Century ITC, as the name also plays off the time travel motif found in the novel.
The cover was painted digitally using an iPad and Photoshop. My biggest challenge with the cover was getting the rain to be noticable but not distracting from the other elements of the composition.
To design a bottle, you first have to look at 100 other bottles! For this project (to design a package), I wanted to break out of my comfort zone and design something a little more upscale. The shape of the bottle was a fun challenge, forcing me to really think about what needs to go where in this limited tall space.
The typefaces are all various forms of Rockwell. I chose the typeface because it has many different fonts, allowing for easy variety that families well. The slab serifs add strength to the brands identity, and I chose to include a traditional simplified illustration of an olive branch to help strengthen the elegance of the design.
The purpose of this assignment was to find a marketable topic and create a blog-style magazine around it, pulling long-form content into easily digestable stories with varied styling. We also had to propose a business model to make the whole project feasible. Spiralia makes money via sponsored content, a premium subscription to access exclusive content, and a web store to grab some Spiralia merchandise.
It uses custom post and page templates to accomodate different stories, which vary in length as well as the amount of pictures, allowing the client to easily post new content and have it still look fresh and interesting.
