Mina Bach Portfolio

The Shelf of Shame

mina — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:19:20 +0000

Initital visuals for ShelfofShame.com done during my internship at Lawrence + Beavan

The Poundshop Oscar Wilde Books

mina — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 10:24:15 +0000

A collection of pocket books specially priced at £1 for The Poundshop at London Design Week 2011.

Selected by Michelle Alger, Buying Manager at Liberty as one of her favourite Poundshop Products and included in the Liberty Picks.

The books are meant to promote the greatest resource in human history: Public Domain as all knowledge will eventually become part of it.

Books will make us free!

The Great Gatsby

mina — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:47:03 +0000

Surf Mama

mina — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:59:55 +0000

Hardback art book memoir I worked on during my internship at Beautiful Books.

The dust jacket has blue surfboards that divide the sections and make up the spine. The cover was Wilma’s painting and her own lettering so I felt the design had to match the mood:

End paper: Wilma uses flowers in her work all the time so a flower pattern made out of surfboards seemed fitting:

To make the artwork and text float nicely every chapter has a B&W icon by Wilma that relates to the story. The page numbers have a wave that goes up and down when you flip them like a flip-book:

I had mentioned the part separators a while back, well, here they are with some minor changes:

Spread with one of my favourite paintings:

More endpaper and back flap featuring Wilma’s portrait:

Detail of the back cover with some of the chapter icons and layout inspired by 60s surf magazines:

Available from Foyles, Amazon or any good book seller!

Oxfam

mina — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 13:31:23 +0000

Poster for Oxfam’s music festival Oxjam to promote ‘The Goonies’ film night.

The Piracy Project

mina — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 17:57:12 +0000

The Piracy Project is an international publishing and exhibition project exploring the philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy and creative modes of reproduction. This project is not about stealing or forgery, it is about creating a platform to innovatively explore the spectrum of copying / re-editing / translating / paraphrasing / imitating / re-organising / manipulating of already existing works. Here creativity and originality sit not in the borrowed material itself, but in the way it is handled.

This is my entry to AND Publishing‘s The Piracy Project: Signed A.C. A visualisation on the ‘false document’ literary device using a well known classic (The Outsider by Albert Camus – with one of the most famous first lines in Literature) as a vehicle touching on the subject of authorship and unique vs. multiples.

The first section of the book, in yellow, introduces the fiction.

A facsimile of the ‘found’ manuscript follows, representing the handwritten original one-off:

Transcription of the manuscript, typeset and laid out as a mass produced paperback:

Beautiful Books Catalogue

mina — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:18:37 +0000

Catalogue for Beautiful Books, produced during my internship. 42 page A5 booklet.

This is the cover spread, cover and back cover:

You can download a pdf version HERE.

The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka

mina — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 21:14:14 +0000

Every book cover is a visual analysis of the narrative, an invitation to read but should never reveal too much. I read The Metamorphosis as a metaphor and for me the room and the door were only a prison in his mind. I tried to recreate this idea in my design and used bold type and a shade of red (carmine) that is extracted from a type of cockroach and widely used as a dye for fabrics, cosmetics and as a natural food colouring. Ideally ‘The Metamorphosis’ would be red metallic foil.

How to WOW a woman

mina — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 16:10:23 +0000

Risographed zine takes the typography of advertising slogans from the 40s and 50s and puts them out of context.

The binding allows for the pages to be taken apart and re-arranged to create a vintage pattern for an apron, should you ever need one.

Part of the Girls+Zines exhibition at Tatty Devine, August-September 2011.

The recurring theme of the man trap and all the different ways to build one:

Lolita

mina — Fri, 13 May 2011 20:51:45 +0000

Film poster for the Ritzy’s, my favourite cinema in South London. Celebrating its centenary this year with a Poster Competition asking to recreate an iconic movie poster in your own style.

I chose Lolita and the iconic heart shaped sunglasses (that funnily enough don’t actually appear in the film) and instead of showing her with the glasses I showed what she would see through them. Type choice is a nod to genius Pablo Ferro’s title sequence for Dr Strangelove (also by Kubrick and Peter Sellers).

The London Design Festival

mina — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:39:10 +0000

Design an A4 poster in one hour or less for London Design Destival Typo Challenge.

Over 100 entries were submitted and I’m very happy that my design was included in the selection on LDF’s flickr set.

Norwegian Wood

mina — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:42:35 +0000

Entry for the Don’t Panic Norwegian Wood film competition: 3rd position from the 400 submissions and was exhibitied at the Curzon Cinemas in Soho (London) in March 2011.

Drawing inspiration from japanese posters from the mid to late 1960s I tried to capture the aesthetics of the period to produce a design that would not look out of place in any of the character’s houses.
The choice and placement of type as well as the background colour suggest both the anguish and hope present in the novel. The composition and the origami figure are obvious references to the love triangles in the story and the difficulty of the relationships between the characters without giving away too much.

Read about the process here on my blog

Different colourways:

Tattoo

mina — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:08:04 +0000

Solar plate prints to illustrate ‘Tattoo‘ loosely based on the 1941 traditional spanish song made famous by the one and only Concha Piquer. It tells the story of a girl that falls in love with a sailor with a tattoo of his ex’s name… read it before I spoil it for you but, I’ll warn you now, it’s heartbreak fest for everyone involved.

The collages combine found photos and images of the period with traditional Tattoo inspired drawings, some of the collages are made out of well over a hundred images.

Handprinted A5 Chine-Collé 1 Ink Solar plates

It was a foreign ship that brought him to me

I found him that dark and cold summers eve

As the lighthouse sent the vessels its gentle kiss

All Charms and hair as light as Ale

Proud he stood with his chest tattooed

His voice an aching nightingale

Soon after one bottle he started to reveal

The story of the name written on his skin

For the deep inked wound would never ever heal

“We once had love but she soon forgot

and forever I shall try to win her back

the only one I truly loved now long gone”

One grey morn in that same ship he disappeared

Having stolen something from between my lips

The one thing I asked him for, a lovers kiss

From then on I have been looking from port to port

Is he dead or alive is all I need to know

The only one I truly loved now long gone

Since that kiss I can’t eat, breathe or sleep

Look at his name now inked deep in my skin

If you find him let him know I am dying for him

Many thanks to Gloria and Veronica for the help and endless patience with the text.

Sans Soleil

mina — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:27:58 +0000

64 page book inspired by the Japanese aesthetics of Wabi Sabi and the imperfect, impermanent, and incompleteness of Beauty. Borrowing the words from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983).

This comes from one of my favourite scenesin the film.