Brief Encounter

Some menu designs for Brief Encounter, the fourth film in the boxed set David Lean Directs Noël Coward. One of the challenges designing this set was creating a unifying visual theme for the four films --something that would tie them all together. Still, I didn't want them conforming rigidly to a single template. Changing up the typefaces was a good start but at the same time I wanted to take things a little further than that. Formally speaking, the set is bookended by two black and white films with two color ones in between. Should the black and white menus have one look and the color ones another? That seemed too on the nose and unnecessarily segregated. Every other film receiving similar treatments felt better. So these menus for Brief Encounter echo the visual themes I established with the Blithe Spirit menus, just as This Happy Breed echos the motifs of the menus for In Which We Serve.

• David Lean Directs Noël Coward