Business Identity

When I first began researching author John Fowles I struggled to find anything of interest about him, as aside from his writing and other peoples accounts of how nasty a person he was, I couldn't find much information on him. This didn't put me off though as chances are most jobs I will be given during my career as a designer won't be things that I am personally interested in, but I will still have to be enthusiastic about them.

I didn't want to be too obvious with my design & simply relate it to Fowles career as an author, as I feel it should be more personal to him. Upon reflection I feel this was a good way to go with it, as simply designing it for a writer would have meant any old author could have used it. The defining characteristics I eventually represented in my design where his vanity (the peacock quill, which also represented his writing & his ornithology hobby, & the use of a photograph of himself). His feelings of superiority to other men (his famous quote "the ordinary man is the curse of civilisation" and use of the colour orange). And a straw hat he wore almost constantly during his later years (I used a small weave pattern next to his photo).

Although initially using script typefaces in the design such as Edwardian Script, Zapfino & Bickham Script Pro to relate to the grandiose perception he had of himself, I eventually went with Bookman Old Style in bold for much of the text as aside from being aesthetically pleasing, it is definitely a strong, bold, self-important typeface, like Fowles himself.

Although I believe Fowles would have approved of my designs as they encapsulated his personality, main interests & also pandered to his vain & egotistical streak, I think that I may have done it slightly differently if we hadn't been under so much pressure in terms of time. I drew a couple of rough illustrations of a peacock in different styles which I would have liked to develop further, but didn't get chance. (I also had flu on the week of the crits for this part of the brief, so may have changed it on the basis of input from the rest of the class). I think that one of my jobs for the summer will be to go back to my work from this unit and spend more time updating them.