The Visual Direction

The Idea

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.

Why It Fits This Story

• 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.

Watch Out

Least gift-able of the three at the BLF table; consider a flap-plus-band launch variant if this direction survives the production test.

The Idea

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.

Why It Fits This Story

• 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.

Watch Out

Cloth, foil and tip-ins add 2 to 3 weeks and need the October print slot booked now; the tip-in depends on the artefact hunt delivering one great scannable object by end-August.