Endless Fascination – The Life and Work of Thomas Pitfield – one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever worked on. I’d never heard of Thomas Pitfield but when I received the manuscript, freshly taken photography from the RNCM archive and incredible scans of Thomas’s work I could tell this would be a fascinating assignment.
Thomas Pitfield was a composer, artist, craftsman and poet from Bolton, Greater Manchester. One reason that this project was so interesting for me personally is that some of Thomas’s designs could be categorised as graphic design. Whilst creating the tiled endpapers – by using his Devil in White and Oxford Wind patterns – I felt an immense sense of importance to respect the artwork I had open in Photoshop; artwork made carefully many years ago by Thomas Pitfield. I felt this regularly as I worked through the manuscript resizing elements, adding illustrations or colophons, or while wondering whether to use a pattern across a two-page spread.
The wonderfully talented Rosemary Firman not only compiled the content and edited the book but wrote a chapter too. The beautiful photography is credited to Michael Pollard – high resolution, framed perfectly and all shot over an easily removable background so that we could make the most of Thomas’s impactful work in our layouts. Forsyth Music in Manchester published the book and I had a tour of this awesome shop when I helped to stick some CDs in the printed copies.
The Thomas Pitfield Trust made it possible to spend time, be daring and and make something special. The Chair, John Turner (yes, he’s actually got his own Wikipedia page), was pivotal in making the whole thing happen. A pleasure and kind soul to work with, John also arranged a special concert at St. Elizabeth’s Church in Ashley, near Altrincham, to celebrate the completion of the book.
There are some more words further down but that’s more than enough for now – photos of the book are below.
The body text was set in my go-to serif for book and magazine design – Minion Pro. We did test a sans-serif – Neue Haas Unica – but we favoured the dependable, highly legible Minion which is better suited to this collection of work by Pitfield.
The headings received more consideration. Thomas often used Blackletter (also known as Gothic Script or Gothic Type) styling in his work – you can see many instances in the book. He was both a scholar and practioner of lettering and calligraphy and as such we wanted to reference this.
After experimenting with Carol Gothic, GT Sectra Display and Luke Thick we settled on Eskapade Fraktur. [A fraktur typeface is a derivative/style of blackletter].
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