Jesse Marinoff Reyes:
LIFE DURING WARTIME: A selection of my WWII (and one WWI) cover designs. In many cases history books (especially military or war) call for BIG type, and often big, generic type which to me is a shame. I was lucky in the examples shown here to skirt around this by arguing for period-authentic design and authentic type forms from the era (or at least type that we have that is unchanged) and being able to use BIG type the right way—to evoke wartime propaganda posters or newspapers and magazines that documented the times as they were unfolding and bring the viewer back to that experience.
JMR Design
The Battle of Britain
W. W. Norton, 2002
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Photograph: Culver Pictures
Art Director: Ingsu Liu
Graphic design applications on either side of the pond aren’t hugely different, but there are differences all the same. I tried to soak in as much British war propaganda as possible to authentically evoke their experience of the war as much as I could and without resorting to variations on the Union Jack. Motion picture and newsreel titling were especially helpful here.
JMR Design
The First World War
Penguin Books, 2005
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Photograph: The Battle of Guillemont, Sept. 3-5, 1916 by Lt. J. W. Brooke (detail). By Permission of the Imperial War Museum, London
Art Director: Paul Buckley
That’s a green metallic ink “deterioration” inside the letterforms, an early 1900s type style. This was, as we were all taught in school, the “war to end all wars” or rather should have been. Still, the finality of that notion lead art director Paul Buckley and I to challenge our publisher’s comfort zone to eschew yet another image of “the lads going over the top” in favor of war’s ultimate reality.
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