Penguin approached bentley soon after they signed Sebastian Faulks to write the new James Bond novel. We had, from the very beginning, wanted to produce a special edition - and having read the manuscript of Devil May Care, Bentley was the first and immediate choice. And so off we went to Crewe, to Bentley HQ, to meet their design team.
Dirk van braeckel is chief designer at Bentley. He studied at the Royal College of Art, one of the first schools to specialize in car design. He then joined the Volkswagen subsidiary Audi in 1984, and was drafted in to head up Bentley's design team when the VW group acquired the company in 1998. There, he created the groundbreaking design for the Bentley Continental GT, launched in 2004 and one of the most successful sports coupés of our times.Under Dirk's guidance, the Bentley Design team have produced the phenomenal design for the Special Series edition.
'What struck me with the Bond story is that throughout the novels there has always been the connection to Bentley which unfortunately has never really surfaced in the films, so unless you are an absolute Bond fan, hardly anybody knows this. Now we were offered an opportunity to get that link a bit more in the open.
~ Dirk van Braeckel
Fresh recruit to the team, Kate Whatmore, was instrumental in conceiving the wonderful combination of design elements which reflect the craftsmanship of Bentley and the period setting of the Bond novels. The end result speaks for itself.
'As well as the time in which the story is set, the treatment for the design that Kate came up with captures in a subtle way the values that Bentley brand stands for: the leatherwork and bright metal parts; even the layout and the typefaces find their inspiration from the older car handbooks, together with some references to what confidential and personal documents looked like in those days.'
'As well as the time in which the story is set, the treatment for the design that Kate came up with captures in a subtle way the values that Bentley brand stands for: the leatherwork and bright metal parts; even the layout and the typefaces find their inspiration from the older car handbooks, together with some references to what confidential and personal documents looked like in those days.'
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