Based on our findings from qualitative interviews, our goal was not to treat the franchise as just another fantastical, made-up story for ‘mainstreamers’ to dive into, but to give Tolkien’s work the respect its fan base desires. The result was a Destination Branding with cross-media communication tools to capture visitors’ attention and evoke a nostalgic feeling among fans. The poster acts like a portal: it invites the viewer to get an overview of the depth of Silmarillion (the story-based book), with the option to deepen their knowledge on the eBook version.

I was responsible for conceptualizing the cross-media communication tools, which consisted of a kindle eReader as a digital version of the poster and a bookmark for the press kit. I also illustrated the thumbnails and graphics from scratch, while Peschanel took care of their rendering into vector graphics and the post-processing to create a coherent overall picture. I also wrote the copy for all media, while Peschanel took care of their typesetting and layout. Fact-based research was divided equally in advance.

Even though the project was created as part of the curriculum at FH Münster and is not a work made public by Amazon, it was interesting to collaborate with a real client at an early stage and go through the process of Design Thinking with the target audience in mind.