Listen Up Philip
Listen Up Philip is a dark comedy about a young writer named Philip (Jason Schwartzman), his photographer girlfriend Ashley (Elisabeth Moss) and Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), the respected older author who becomes his mentor. CHIPS worked closely with director Alex Ross Perry to design believable (and subtly satirical) book covers not only for Philip’s relatively recent releases, but for Zimmerman’s entire back catalog.
The style of each book conforms to design trends and tropes of the era it was supposed to have been published, using typefaces that would have been widely available at the time. The covers feature prominently in several key scenes.
After its premiere at Sundance, Tribeca Film purchased Listen Up Philip and hired CHIPS to apply the movie’s design sensibility to its marketing materials.
The design of the theatrical poster is meant to evoke film posters of the 1970s with its thin border and abundant white space. Its central image is a painting by illustrator Anna Bak-Kvapil.
For the key art displayed on video-on-demand services such as iTunes and Netflix, we were required to feature the stars’ faces instead of using the painting from the theatrical poster. What we came up with resembles — what else? — a vintage book jacket. The animated titles we created for the trailer follow suit.