Visual direction and production

What the manuscript asks for

The current draft uses short, quote-led chapters. Readers should recognise each speaker quickly, follow disagreements easily and get enough visual variation across a run of testimony. The pages should feel precise, warm and alive to the humour in the interviews.

The working rules

• One consistent grammar for chapter openings, speakers, quotations, sources and editorial narration.
• Use scale, white space, paper, diagrams, artefacts and interludes to vary the pace while keeping the visual language consistent.
• Part breaks and interludes can carry Bangalore, bureaucracy, Bedford/Dallas, culture and the commissioned reporting without pretending each is a conventional essay.
• Use names and voices to help readers move through the testimony.

Low-resolution material

Use a consistent halftone, duotone or related reproduction rule so phone photographs, old scans and documents feel intentionally held by the same book. The treatment must be tested at actual size on the intended stock; the screen is not the verdict.

High-resolution material

Let strong photographs run with their detail intact when the image earns the space. Artefacts can be isolated, enlarged, annotated or sequenced. Technical diagrams and timelines should share the book’s typography and line language, not imitate archive documents.

The earlier concept

A section-sewn paperback with french flaps, printed in black plus one spot colour on warm uncoated stock throughout. Design carries the production ambition: testimony set large and confident, the wit register running as vermillion marginalia, artefacts redrawn or reproduced as tinted duotones. The cover borrows the visual language of the bonded-warehouse form and the smallest ad in the Hindustan Times: typographic, stamped, unmistakably of 1985. Nothing glossy anywhere; the object feels like a well-made working paper that survived four decades.

What survives into the system

• Duotone treatment makes uneven archive photos look intentional; the design is immune to a thin photo haul.
• Two-colour printing on uncoated stock is the same discipline the first batch worked under: hard things done well within limits.
• Fastest to produce; lowest risk against the 30 Sept design freeze.

What to test

Whether a disciplined spot-colour and uncoated treatment can carry both archive grit and a book people want to keep.

The earlier concept

A cloth-bound case with a foil-debossed satellite dish and no jacket; a belly band carries the title so the cloth stays quiet. Four stocks choreograph the whole arc: a tinted stock for the graphic-novel prologue, cream uncoated for testimony, coated plates for photographs, and a short coloured signature that isolates the epilogue, 756002, like a sealed record. Inside the back cover, a printed pocket holds a tip-in facsimile, an employee ID card or the first-export document, so every copy hands the reader a piece of the archive. Optionally numbered, 1 to 300, after the first batch.

What survives into the system

• The tip-in turns the funders' artefact hunt into the book's signature moment: the object literally contains the archive.
• Stock changes give the graphic-novel prologue and the epilogue the staging the story spine already calls for.
• A numbered edition of 300 mirrors the first 300 employees; the BLF launch gets a genuine collectible.

What to test

How much object-level invention belongs in the collector’s binding without forcing a different interior or creating fragile production dependencies.