war games

Jesse Marinoff Reyes:

LIFE DURING WARTIME: A selection of my WWII (and one WWI) cover designs. In many cases history books (especially military or war) call for BIG type, and often big, generic type which to me is a shame. I was lucky in the examples shown here to skirt around this by arguing for period-authentic design and authentic type forms from the era (or at least type that we have that is unchanged) and being able to use BIG type the right way—to evoke wartime propaganda posters or newspapers and magazines that documented the times as they were unfolding and bring the viewer back to that experience.

JMR Design

War Without Hate (formerly, The Battle of Alamein)
Penguin Books, 2004
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Photograph: (c) The Robert Hunt Library, London
Art Director: Paul Buckley

Another riff on the 1940s poster design “tilt” once again with period-accurate type faces. The textural treatment here inspired by, if not overtly evoking, the sort of stenciling you see on tanks.

The title refers to the idea that, however bitterly fought, the Battle of Alamein had been fought with almost genteel notions of “fair play” (the Geneva Conventions and all that), not always practiced in this war nor most any other. The photograph shows a wounded Eighth Army soldier and a wounded Afrika Korps soldier smoking together.