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Tuesday 12 April 2011

Handmade book project

My first idea was to cut the pages of a book that would look like a fist coming out.

It was lovely to make I was happy with the test piece but it was too literal for Fight Club. I had spent most of my time trying to avoid aggressive imagery in my works as it might lead to the conclusion that Fight Club is only about violence. I'm happy I went away from this idea in the end although I might still finish off an end product for myself.

Soap is possibly the most iconic image from Fight Club and with good reason.

Soap is used as a metaphor for selling somthing people don't want back to them. In the Novel they steal the waste from Liposuction and use it to make soap. Its decribed in the book how to make a bomb from basic ingredients and in this case they use human fat but it also makes a truly excellent soap which is sold to boutiques for $20 a bar. The idea of the men in this book using soap is, in itself, a joke. These men don't care about their appearence. they don't even care if they loose their teeth they don't want to conform to what society dictates.

This book is made from cheap bars of soap (4 for 99cent) and it is held together primarily with wax but also a bit of suger glue where I was afraid it might be too weak under the weight of the soap. The book was only ment to resemble a book in the spin and the pages I wanted to make it quiet obvious that it was made from soap and not wax. I also used a scented candle to make it smell pretty... kinda regretted that one after a couple of hours of being in close proximity to it.

Final product

I decided to keep the spine on and have masking tape running down the spine. I tested it on my friend and parents and they didn't disappoint, it caught peoples attention and everyone instinctively tried to remove the masking tape. I like to have little guinea pigs, they amuse me...

I found it important to get the handwritten element across so I hand wrote the title and the authors name on the front cover and spine.

Monday 11 April 2011

This idea was a reference to the journals the narrator finds and reads in the home he's squatting in. The journals were written in the first person of a person's organs. This is the method the narrator uses to refer to himself as you never learn the real name of the narrator.

I imagined the journals to be handwritten on the american style notebooks. I also thought that because the house they were living in was in poor repair that the journals would be in quite a state. I always imagined them as being a copy barely held together and the pages turned yellow from water damaged and passing time.

I then went on to experiment with the actual cover of the book and attempted to hide a face in the front cover. My plan was for the face to only be truly visible when your far away from the book cover or if you went looking for it when up close to it.

I then thought about removing the spine to make it look like it wasn't taken care of at all.

Fight Club Book cover ideas

My Little attempts at repeated patterns. I've noticed that repeated patterns have become more and more popular in recent times, although I never felt truly happy with the effect it gave for this project. I loved the idea of the members of fight club blending into everyday society and only something subtle setting them apart.

In the novel itself the narrator describes injuries either he sustained or someone else and the reactions to those injuries from other people. I wanted to use these injuries as a factor that would cause people to look twice at the book cover, I wanted it to be the hole in someones cheek that they can't stop looking at.

My main idea was to hide something strange in the middle of a pattern that people were talking for granted.

I used blank and expressionless males for the cover ,as there is no women aloud in fight club but also because any form of change would add character which by the end of the novel many of the men have become no more than mindless zombies.