Who Said You Can’t Travel in 2020?
I took advantage of quarantine to develop a fictional book campaign for Penguin Books. The concept was to promote classic stories as timeless escapes from 24/7 self isolation, and to potentially inspire a new generation’s love for literature. The brief called for a design that was playful and ironic; which lead to the tagline “Who Said You Can’t Travel in 2020?”. The visual language was inspired by reinterpreting vintage travel posters, with each location having its own interpretation of “isolation”- only understood through reading their books.
Process
This was one of those projects that fell into itself conceptually quite wonderfully. I began by determining what books and locations to include within the theme of “isolation”. Drawing from classic vintage travel posters, it was just a matter of composition and typesetting to develop a striking image.
Initially, I was considering making each poster with vector art- as to modernise it. However I figured each subject was sufficiently modern as to carry itself, and in this I began painting each scene with guache and watercolour.
From here, it was a matter of digitally cleaning up each piece and editing them for a striking poster. This would ultimately come down to unifying the colours and pushing the details sufficiently into the background as to ensure the typesetting would pop. From here, the tagline and typesetting of the campaign would be edited to make sure everything fit well and had visual clarity.