Ian Fleming’s spy thrillers received a stylish makeover with these Saul Bass-inspired cover designs.
The paperback covers are designed by publisher Random House’s in-house team to emphasize the cool sophistication of Ian Fleming’s ubiquitous agent 007 and to evoke the era without appearing dated.
The 14 reissued covers were created by six separate designers. Creative director Suzanne Dean briefed the designers to be inspired by Saul Bass, best known for movie art such as posters and title sequences including Psycho, The Man with the Golden Gun, and North by Northwest.
Bass once described his main goal for his title sequences as being to ‘try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story’. The color palette was referenced from Bass’s posters, and introduced an authentic retro feel by cutting out the designs.
The typography was painstakingly deliberated over too. Folio was one of the first popular sans-serif fonts and was used in a lot of newspaper and display graphics of the period, the font was perfect for the graphic film posters of the '50s and '60s.
Folio is a realist sans-serif font designed by Konrad Bauer and Walter Baum in 1957, and is more closely related to Akzidenz Grotesk (1896) than similar fonts like Helvetica. It has a strong circular 'O’ in its bold version, which formed an important feature within our designs, and had the added attraction of having a very '50s-feeling bold condensed version. Mixing the two gives an immediate retro feel, while having a fresh take on layout also keeps the covers contemporary.
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