This is a design brief written for the graphic design students at Central Saint Martins. I often wonder what would happen to bookshops should the need for them to carry a physical inventory disappear (perhaps because they print everything on-demand). Of course, without the need to stock and display vast numbers of books, they would probably give up their expensive rents and migrate completely to the web.
I would like to imagine, however, that a particularly enterprising chain of bookshops isn’t so hasty to save money and decide to use the newly freed space to sell books in new and interesting ways. Welcome to Bookland...
Aims
To think about book packaging as being more than a simple dust-jacket.
Background
Bookshops today are places to browse dusty shelves and drink cappuccinos. In the near future it is conceivable that books will be bought and sold in an entirely electronic format to be read on-screen or printed on-demand. This would likely spell the end for traditional bookshops and traditional books…
From the outside, Bookland looks just like any other high-street shop. Stepping inside Bookland is like walking into a literary theme-park. Rather than selling books through slick marketing and critical acclaim, Bookland offers its customers a taste of the experience waiting to be unlocked inside each book on sale. Narrative worlds bleed off the page and onto the shop-floor.
Brief
Choose a novel that is important to you and that you would recommend to others. Design the way that your chosen novel manifests in Bookland (the novel’s ‘point of sale’). How do you entice the shopper into the world of your novel and convince them to buy a copy? Because Bookland is a very unconventional shop, your novel needn’t manifest as a well-packaged book on a shelf. It could instead appear as one of the following:
- A graphic interpretation or synopsis of the novel
- An installation communicating the novel’s atmosphere or setting
- A dramatisation of the book’s narrative in the form of a short play or film
- An actor employed to play a character from the novel and approach customers
- A situation or happening
- A spectacle
References
Look at the ways in which other products are packaged. Toy packaging, for instance, will allow you to play with the toy without unwrapping it. Food packaging will often let you smell and squeeze the contents. Look at theme-parks such as Disneyland and the way they recreate fictional worlds.
Eyeballs per single column centimetre | Design and the Elastic Mind
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