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Crash Cover Conundrum
Author: Simon Sellars • Jun 7th, 2008 •Category: Ballardosphere, speed & violence, visual art
So, what’s happened with the competition to design the cover of the new, limited edition of Crash? The deadline for submissions was April 30 and the winner was supposed to be announced on May 28. But there’s no word at all over at the Times’ official competition page, and on the flickr page set up for contestants to upload their entries there’s not a sausage.
Can anyone shed light on this?
While we’re waiting, I’ve uncovered a few related items that will be of interest…
I’ve previously featured book designer Henry Sene Yee, so I was interested to see the following on his blog:
I found these early ideas I had for J.G. Ballard’s CRASH on a bunch of SyQuest 44 MB cartridges. Sketches by Stanley Martucci of Griesbach / Martucci.
The first one was to depict crash test dummies in Kama Sutra poses. I wanted to illustrate a chart of multiple positions but Sales thought that this would never fly in Wal-Mart so I never got beyond this sketch stage. Hmm, when was the last time you saw J.G. Ballard’s sold in Wal-Mart?
There’s another of Henry’s Crash designs in that post, and there are more of his Ballard covers (that actually got published) here.
And this from Alex Pines:
This was the first assignment for my Advanced Design 2 class at MICA. I missed putting in some other stuff, but this is a pretty broad overview of my process for this project. I really just wanted to see how a post like this would look in a blog format.
1. Project Description
Design a book cover for one of J.G. Ballard’s novels. Research Ballard’s books and read essays by Rick McGrath and Rick Poynor.2. Research
The novel I picked was Crash. Crash was written in 1973 by Ballard. It is one of Ballard’s more controversial stories. The story is about car-crash fetishism. The characters are sexually aroused by staging and participating in car crashes. The main character is Dr. Robert Vaughn, a former TV scientist. In addition to reading about the story, I gathered images of all the previous covers.
Alex goes on to detail the various rounds he undertook to get to a final design, with examples from each and his rationale along the way. I found it very interesting to negotiate. I wonder if Alex knew about the competition, though?
Alex’s Crash covers: second round.
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I did intend to enter something for this but was too busy in the end. This was what I came up with anyway…
http://img262.imageshack.us/img262/4476/crashsh1.jpg
Cheers, Ricky. I still would like to know what’s happened to the comp, though!
I entered too, hadn’t seen this approach with dummies, but it’s remarkably similar to my entry in the final competition…
http://www.kevlev.co.uk/Kevin_Levell/crash.html
http://bp1.blogger.com/__HDuLFUg18A/R9J61UIMIyI/AAAAAAAAAKE/wjm7j5jumow/s1600-h/actual_entry.jpg
I’ve seen nothing of a result and I’ve done a number of searches but have uncovered only a few other entries:
leona clarke:
http://www.leonaclarke.co.uk/uploaded_images/Crash_leona_clarke2-727986.jpg
daniel gray:
http://www.binkythedoormat.com/binky/images/2008/04/25/crashjgballard.jpg
george pollard:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/reggio/2455743017/
my fave is leona’s but good luck to all who entered anyway…
Love the crash test dummies.
Hey,
I dropped by to ask this same question. I entered:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iancaulkett/2454429028/sizes/m/
but would love to see the winning entry!