— Mina Bach

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Competitions

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest Penguin Awards 2012

By: mina
21-04-2012
Book Covers, Competitions

This is my entry for the Penguin Student Awards competition, a book cover design for ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’ by Ken Kesey:

The brief asked to come at it from a fresh angle:  ’Try to design a new cover for a new generation of readers, avoiding the obvious clichés and steering clear of the film promotional graphics and looking at the  many themes within the book – political, social, victim, antihero, madness, sanity, affection, violence etc.’

Such a powerful story told from the perspective of  Chief Bromden. His voice as a narrator is so strong -ironically- that I started looking at native American prints (pinterest board) and its flat geometric shapes became the base for the graphic elements, almost pictograms. As  for the colours I knew I wanted to use hospital green in conjunction with white, the colours of the asylum, and red for the cross and the contrasting elements. The clinical type is influenced by the great Lawrence Weiner that I saw in TypoLondon a few months ago.

 

 

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Don’t look now British Film Institute & Creative Review Competition

By: mina
03-04-2012
Competitions

Good news! I was joint runner-up in the British Film Institute & Creative Review competition to design a cover for Mark Sanderson’s book on horror classic ‘Don’t Look Now’ for the 20th anniversary of the BFI film classic series. Seeing my work on the Creative Review site (here) has been the highlight OF MY LIFE, pretty much. The panel of judges included Rebecca Barden, BFI Publishing senior publisher; Sophia Contento BFI Publishing senior production editor; Patrick Burgoyne, editor at Creative Review; Rob Winter, publisher at Sight &Sound and the original book’s author Mark Sanderson.

The film, based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, is set in England and Venice with water and the mysterious red coat playing a major role in both. What is seen and most importantly what is unseen create the tensions that fuel the story and I wanted to recreate that with the typography.

Some screencaps of the film:

Thanks to LCC for the nice words here.

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D&AD Little White Lies Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy cover entry

By: mina
21-03-2012
Book Covers, Competitions

This is my entry to the D&AD + Little White Lies student awards. I went for ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ after considering ‘Drive’ and ‘Black Swan’. I liked them all but TTSS is the only out of the 3 that’s not a real LWL issue and the only based on a book.

Little White Lies is one of my favourite magazines, I even bought my brother a subscription for Christmas a couple years ago! I love how the layout and typography change with every issue to go with the themes and mood of the feature film. The covers are always, always spot on but one thing I have always wondered is why the LWL white dot logo is never incorporated in the illustration so I really wanted mine to.

 

 

I’m not going to spoil the story but basically George Smiley, the main character and Gary Oldman in the film, has to investigate and identify a Soviet mole in the MI6 from where he’s just retired. The white queen holds a special meaning (also the most powerful piece in chess) so I used it as the central image incorporating the LWL logo. The portrait(s) of Smiley are not revealed fully much like his personality and, well, his job as a secret agent. The colours also reference the union jack and the typography has a soviet feel to it (look at that ‘K’, niiice!).

Fingers crossed!

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Lolita Poster

By: mina
13-05-2011
Competitions, Posters

I’m really trying to make an effort to enter more competitions this year. This time it’s a film poster for the Ritzy’s, my favourite cinema in South London and definitely one of the things that make me cross the river with joy. The cinema is celebrating its centenary this year with a Poster Competition asking to recreate an iconic movie poster in your own style.

I chose Lolita and  the iconic heart shaped sunglasses (that funnily enough don’t actually appear in the film) and instead of showing her with the glasses I showed what she would see through them. The type is a nod to genius Pablo Ferro’s title sequence for Dr Strangelove (also by Kubrick and Peter Sellers).

Lolita-Ritzy-Alternative-Poster-by-Mina-BachThe prize is 50 tickets for X-Men: First Class (!) and two tickets a month for the rest of the year plus a framed print of the poster and being part of the exhibition. Wish me luck!

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Tigerprint Runner-up
Ta very much!

By: mina
04-05-2011
Competitions, Greeting Cards

As I said in my previous post, I entered the Tigerprint Hand Drawn Type competition with the ‘Congratuwelldone‘ embroidery piece. In the last minute I thought to include two other sketches I made with my submission (meant to embroider them as well but ran out of time, I’m so slow!). Why not, right.

Well, I couldn’t be happier that one of them actually made it and was chosen as one of the 5 runners up!

ohyes-tigerprint-by-Mina-Bach

The best bit is that I got really interesting feedback from them that I’m definitely going to take on for future projects. As a student, getting industry input is absolutely priceless. They liked the idea of using ‘Ta very much‘ (like Congratuwelldone and Oh YES maaaaybe not your average greeting card) but were concerned the design was not commercial enough and suggested to push it further to see how else it could work.

It also got me thinking how it’s not always about the skill or time you spend on the production (took me 3 days on-off to complete the embroidery) but the idea behind it.

Ta very much!:

Ta-very-much-tigerprint-by-Mina-Bach

It was very exciting to follow the judging pretty much live on their blog, facebook and twitter, all constantly updated with information and pictures of the process.

tigerprint-screenshot

I’ve always wondered what a judging session would look like, not sure I’d want to be in their place though, so many amazing entries! :

Tigerprint-judging

Tigerprint-judging2

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Congratuwelldone!

By: mina
03-05-2011
Competitions, Greeting Cards

And so the last term of my second year started. Dissertation proposal handed in (with a massive 10 minutes to spare, well done me) the holidays are officially over. I’ve had quite a few projects on the go this Easter and had a lot of fun with them, one of my favourite ones is this embroidery piece that I finished just a couple days ago.

Here’s is a picture of the process:

Embroidery-process-Mina-Bach

It’s a greeting card design for Hallmark/Tigerprinters’ competition that do all the cards for Marks & Spencers so I wanted to keep their customer in mind (male or female aged 30 plus according to them) but also keep my style and make it fun. As the brief was hand drawn typography and that’s what I do most of the time I tried something a bit different and put the embroidery skills learnt at Dudua’s workshop to good use:

Congratuwelldone-Mina-BAch

I used festive/summer colours and since I could use my own copy, well, I went for it:

Congratuwelldone-Tigerprint-by-Mina-Bach

Congratuwelldone!

I’m happy with the outcome and while my embroidery needs a bit of polishing it was good to try something new. Will let you know how it goes.

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Jackie of Hearts

By: mina
30-04-2011
Competitions, Illustration

Hope you’re well and enjoying the sun. I’m making the most of my holidays working on typesetting, layouts and picture ebooks (exciting stuff) at Beautiful Books, having picnics, long walks and going to the market and even visiting the BBC to be in the audience of channel 4 10 o’clock live (David Mitchell, man of my dreams). And writing my dissertation proposal of course. Or at least trying to.

Anyway, I just sent out my submission to the Versus playing cards collective project. After much debate, I chose to illustrate the Jack starting with a special one, Jackie O(f) Hearts. The set is completed by Jackie Chan, Jack Nicholson and Jack Daniels.

I hope she’s not too hard to recognise as I messed a bit too much with her features. The cars may well be in bad taste but hey, that’s how I roll…

JackieofHearts-by-Mina-Bach

Feedback always welcome!

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