The Brief
The brief asked for the production of a shop fit-out handbook for new retailers at the King's Cross heritage site redevelopment
The solution
The client was very prescriptive over the format which needed to mimic a Moleskin notebook as well as referencing the area and its history. So using this as a basis for the design I adopted a central band for the cover as the layout for the cover - as seen on Moleskin products when on sale in bookshops. A background colour of charcoal grey was then chosen to reflect the Moleskin covers and the coal and smoke of the steam engines that once filled the King's Cross site. Worn browns and oranges were then used as accent colours referencing the rust and patinas of the sites tunnels, bridges and industrial landscape.
The main copy layout was built around a 2 grid system. The first grid split the page into thirds with alternating black and white sections. This allowed for more comfortable reading of body text which could be set against a white background rather than a black one. The second grid was used for the section headings. Here I adopted a bold centrally aligned text panel set over site imagery. This arrangement was used as a reference to the various old railway and tunnel signage seen throughout the site.
The typeset chosen was the DIN Condensed family. The Industrial legacy of this typeset along with the elongated glyphs made this a logical choice given the context of the site and the unusual stretched moleskin format.
