Often our best work never sees the light of day—a lot of what we do is initial concept work, which sometimes never makes it past that stage. Oxford University Press approached us to create concepts for their Australian Dictionary and Thesaurus series, which was to undergo a major redesign. A dozen or so agencies were commissioned to produce concepts which were then narrowed down to a small handful, ours being one of them. Unfortunately none of the shortlisted concepts ever went further—the publishers instead opting to incrementally evolve the existing series in-house until they're ready for that big leap into the unknown. We had a ball designing these covers, so if they never make it to the book shelf, at least they made it here.
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| A range of visual directions based on a single title, a number of rounds into the process |
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| We ended up refining two directions—this one is called Glyphs and uses super-sized letterforms for the different dictionary titles (e.g. Pocket, Regular, Mini), special characters for Thesaurus/Integrated Thesaurus and playful typefaces for Secondary and Primary School editions |
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| The other direction we refined was The Big O (also in homage to the late, great Roy Orbison) which takes the O from the Oxford logo and places it front-and-centre as the hero of every cover. Changing the colourway outside the O indicates a different title in the Dictionary series, whilst changing the colour inside the O indicates a different series (eg Thesaurus) |
