The Great Gatsby

hfour — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:36:54 +0000

I put together a book cover design for The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby’s early 1920s yellow Rolls Royce symbolizes the post-war era of wealth and excess. Gatsby’s car is “a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns”. The yellow represents materialism and money, and the green represents the light at the end of the dock in East Egg which Gatsby views from across the bay, a possible symbol of love, hope and dreams. The type and border are representative of the Art Deco era.

Typefaces used:
Broadway, from 1927, designed by Morris Fuller Benton, now commonly used to evoke the 1920s-30s.
Futura, from 1927, designed by Paul Renner.

Homage to Verner Panton

hfour — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 04:09:55 +0000

Verner Panton was a furniture and textiles designer to put it very briefly. His lifetime of great works include the Tulip Chair, the S Chair (A breakthrough in plastics) and Visiona II (a cave-like hybrid between room and furniture). In addition to furniture, Panton produced some stunning textile designs. I investigated some of the circular patterns and came up with the following design:

The original inspiring work is quite stunning: Many of Panton’s designs preceeded the op-art trends of the mid-late 1960s by over a decade.

Panton’s use of colour and form in his textile work is a pinnacle of design in my opinion. Not quite fully psychedelic, just enough ‘op’ art, and containing sufficient visual stimulation to delight the mind.

Hfour » Uncategorized

The Great Gatsby

Homage to Verner Panton