Hasta La Ideas

BFI Publishing and CR are pleased to announce that Benio Urbanowicz, a third year student from Kingston University, is the winner of our competition to design a cover for a 20th anniversary edition of the BFI Film Classic book on Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now

CR and BFI Publishing invited students to create artwork for the special edition cover which will form part of a set of 12 new covers for the BFI Film Classics series’ 20th anniversary, to be published in August. The winning design (below) was chosen by a panel of judges including Rebecca Barden, BFI Publishing, senior publisher; Sophia Contento, BFI Publishing senior production editor; Patrick Burgoyne, editor, Creative Review; Rob Winter, publisher, Sight &Sound and the original book’s author Mark Sanderson.

Speaking aboout his idea for the cover, Urbanowicz says “I managed to find a beige coat I thought looked similar to the coat from the film in Oxfam, then crafted a hood out of cartridge paper and added it to the coat. Then I stuffed the coat with newspaper to make it look as if someone was wearing it. Suspended on string from the ceiling, I poured red gloss over the jacket and let it drip slowly, whilst adjusting my lighting. Shot against a neutral background, I was able to use Photoshop to extract every red tone in my photograph, which I layered onto a charcoal background.”

This clip documents the process

You can see more of Urbanowicz’s work here and here.

As well as seeing his work in print, Urbanowicz also wins a set of all twelve anniversary editions and an invitation to the series launch events.

There were two joint runners-up. Mina Bach of LCC created this artwork which the judges particulalry liked for its imaginative use of the red coat motif that is such a strong part of the film’s iconography and its reference to another major theme from the film, the waterways in Venice:

While John Walker of the University of Huddersfield referenced a still from the film itself to great effect in his entry

The following entries were highly commedend by the judges:

Dan Jones, Kingston University

Frederick Goodchild, LCC

Hannah Myatt, Kingston University

Hannah Rollings, University of Brighton

Jacek Rudzki, Kingston University

Julie Sheridan, Glasgow School of Art

Madeline Whitty, Kingston University

Poppy Panter-Whitlock, University of the West of England

Rafael Farias, RCA

Richard Buffery, Coventry University

Simeng Zhao, Kingston University

Thanks to everyone who entered. Here are the rest of the covers that will form the 20th anniversary set.

CR in Print

Thanks for visiting the CR website, but if you are not also reading CR in print you’re missing out. Our April issue has a cover by Neville Brody and a fantastic ten-page feature on Fuse, Brody’s publication that did so much to foster typographic experimentation in the 90s and beyond. We also have features on charity advertising and new Pentagram partner Marina Willer. Rick Poynor reviews the Electric Information Age and Adrian Shaughnessy meets the CEO of controversial crowdsourcing site 99designs. All this plus the most beautiful train tickets you ever saw and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Thunderbirds in our Monograph supplement

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