Tenth Letter of the Alphabet: Ray Bradbury

Showing posts with label Ray Bradbury. Show all posts

Monday, October 14, 2019

Lettering: Fahrenheit 451

In 1984 Byron Preiss Visual Publications produced a video game adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for Trillium. The book was published by Ballantine Books on October 19, 1953.

Byron Preiss gave an Atari console to me to create the graphics. I don’t recall the model number. Below are my ideas for the title sequence. Preiss wanted to use a salamander in the sequence.

This sequence focused on the city skyline and face of the main character, Guy Montag.

A color story board was made of the sequence. Below is the black-and-white photocopy of it.

Revisions were requested and the following sequence was used for the game.

It was tedious work creating the art and lettering.

The game was previewed in Time magazine.

(Next post on Monday: Tom Mix Memorial)

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Under Cover: Dinosaur Tales

Byron Preiss produced a collection of Ray Bradbury short stories called Dinosaur Tales, which was published by Bantam Books. The book featured illustrations by Overton Loyd, Moebius, Kenneth Smith, Steranko, William Stout, David Weisner and Gahan Wilson. Ray Harryhausen wrote the foreword, and Bradbury did the introduction.

Byron told me that Bantam Books wanted Bradbury’s name and the title to be big. I used a few LetraSet typefaces, whose names I’ve forgotten. With Instant Lettering it was easy to manipulate the letterspacing and baseline of the words. Below are a couple of cover comps, with smaller type, featuring Stout’s first concept for the cover art.