Fantastic Mr. Fox
For my publishing class, I chose to redesign a childhood favorite of mine (both book and movie), Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. As a semester-long endeavor, I pulled the most important text and points of the plot and created a new, illustrated edition of the children’s novel. As part of the assignment, at the end of the semester, I printed, trimmed and bound the final book!
Scope:
Publishing
Illustration
Layout
Bookbinding
Illustration
Layout
Bookbinding
Design & Execution: Anna Williams
Instructor: Paul Kepple
Developing an Illustration Style
& Layout System
& Layout System
Knowing where to start with this book was a challenge at first because both the book and movie adaption have such distinct styles, and I wanted to nod at their aesthetics but bring my own twist to the visuals. Having never done character design before (or really even drawing animals in general), it took some trial and error to draw characters that felt like they fit the personality of their descriptions throughout the book.
I chose a direction with flat, shape-based characters but brought depth and texture to the story by using halftones and grain shading within little details. Once I had the characters and color palette in place, I build a system where I had a rotating set of spot illustrations, half-page spreads, and full-spread illustrations. It was important to me that since this was a kid’s novel and not a basic picture book, I kept the layout dynamic and vary the range of illustration formats to support the text.
The Deliverables
The final deliverables include the book cover and 17 spreads picked out from the most significant moments of the story. The pages include illustrated endpapers, a title page, chapter openers, and regular pages. A large part of the assignment at the end of the semester was to prep, print, and bind the book into a physical piece using the “Tyler Bind”; It was a really rewarding experience to walk away with something so carefully handcrafted.
