Books, books and Apps.

I've been designing two new books for Tom Phillips which are soon to be published by the Bodleian Library. The Bodleian has recently acquired the archive of all Tom's correspondence and his vast photographic postcard collection. They are planning to publish a series of small volumes from the collection, each one containing over 200 images in a particular theme or subject. The first two will be Readers with a foreword by David Lodge, and Women & Hats with a foreword by Philip Treacy. These were really good fun to do, and the photographs are fascinating. Also a little bit easier to work on than African Goldweights in which all the weights were reproduced at actual size. All had to be measured and the image sizes set to be completely accurate. This made the layout a nightmare! I'm now starting work on Bicycles and Weddings which will be out next year.


The covers are all coloured in 'period' liveries like old cars of the 30's and 40's. I have a lovely new set of pantone CMYK samples which I pore over endlessly. I once borrowed a set of old BMC paint sample chips when we were restoring the van, and tried to chose the paint colour from it. I had a terrible time deciding as they were all so lovely. It even had the lilac paint used on the Minor Millions in it. In the end we went for Pale Primrose. Not a Morris colour, but one used on early MG Midgets. It matched a set of 40's teacups I'd found in a charity shop. Cars nowadays are so dreadfully boring.

We've also been developing an iPad App with Jonathan Hills and John Bowring based on Tom's treated Victorian novel A Humument. This is a very exciting thing. The last published edition of A Humument was in 2004. Tom has since made 39 brand new pages and we've used all the tiff files from the 2004 Thames & Hudson edition, many scanned then for the first time since they were created. It should be in the App store in a few weeks and an iPhone version will follow. It's a lovely, fun thing, and seeing the pages in the iPad screen in full luminous colour is a real joy.