Posts Tagged ‘poster’
Space Invaders Rd. 2
Monday, July 20th, 2009
The above is a detail from the new version of "The Many Faces of a Space Invader," created for an upcoming video game art zine. The new version features ten new characters, and I'm looking into my options for printing it.
Tags: poster, simpsons, space invaders
Posted in Portfolio, Video Games | No Comments »
3 Flickr Sets
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Otl Aicher's Munich 1972 poster series (uploaded by Blanka)
Vernacular Typography Polaroids (by onpaperwings)
Otl Aicher is one of my favorite graphic designers, and his identity work for '72 Olympics in Munich is worth studying if you have any interest in how work like this is supposed to be done. I don't much about the Vernacular Typography Polaroids other than there are some great examples of hand-drawn type in there. Check out the book "Handjob" by Mike Perry for more (modern) examples. Lastly, a set of posters for Int'l Male, a nightclub act. Loved this bit from the description: "Images were sourced variously and used without permission. Posters were printed digitally and thrown away after the gig." Must be Swedish or something.
Tags: Design, flickr, poster
Posted in Design | No Comments »
Process: My Bigfoot poster
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
A few weeks ago we got the word that the AIGA: Detroit (American Institute of Graphic Arts) was hosting the third fourth iteration of the Urban Forest Project, and that Media Genesis had been selected to produce two of the posters. For those that don't know, the Urban Forest Project (first held in New York City in the Fall of 2006) is an outdoor exhibition of posters dealing with issues of the environment, specifically trees and their importance in our ecosystem. Denver hosted the second Urban Forest Project shortly thereafter, and more recently Baltimore was the lucky host.
After researching some of the posters produced for both the New York and Denver projects, Matt and I began sketching out ideas for what we would produce. The brief mentioned using trees as a metaphor, but we both noticed that previous designers had taken this very literally and we began brainstorming ways around the "tree trap."
One night before falling asleep the phrase "Reason to Save the Trees #____" popped into my head. This seemed like a promising start; it was a blank canvas to come up with bizarre and off-the-beaten-path ways to subvert the "tree trap." I remember having a few impossibly ridiculous ideas at first, but the one that stuck was that of a homeless Bigfoot. This intrigued me. Bigfoot = funny, but Bigfoot with a bindle = comedy gold.
The next day at work I drew this:
I was excited about this direction, so I started to work in Illustrator. After a bit of drawing around I realized that if he was holding a sign instead of a bindle, there would be a great opportunity for a second joke inside the sign. Pretty soon I had this:
After messing around with some type treatments in Illustrator, and being generally unhappy with the results, I decided to move everything in to Photoshop. Generally Illustrator is the preferred app for print work, especially large posters, but in this case I wanted to try some things with layer grouping and blending effects that I felt more comfortable doing in Photoshop. After a couple missteps I decided to put the image in a frame, with the text outside it. Because this would be hanging on street lamps, I put all the text underneath the image. Bigfoot's sign was still blank, so I polled some people on what Homeless Bigfoot's sign should say. My girlfriend came up with "Will Verify Existence For Food," so I scribbled this on a piece of paper and scanned it.
Finally I had something that resembled a poster:
It was right around this time that we had our first internal critique involving me, Matt, and Antoine. It was a generally positive crit, although some very good valid points were brought up. One issue was the separation of text and image (I agreed that the layout seemed lifted from a Far Side cartoon). Another was the complexity, there were after all three "jokes" in something that most people would only glance at as they walked by. Not only that, but they were in a strange order:
Back in Photoshop I did my best to address these issues. Rachel suggested I replace the text in the sign with "Homeless and Hungry," which I really liked because it brought the text and image together and also simplified the layout (two jokes instead of three, basically). To accommodate this I had to move the text to the top, which I was skeptical of doing but if there's one thing I've learned about design it's that you have to be willing to experiment. Your gut feeling isn't always right, and your design isn't sacred, so you might as well experiment.
The obvious thing that felt unresolved to me at this point was the "Would Be" text. It was just sitting there, not doing anything for the design, but I was getting a little frustrated and couldn't see a better solution.
A few days passed and I came back to it. It felt off. It was awkward to read, and there was still too much going on. I decided then that my mantra from that point on would be "simplify, simplify." I took out everything that I thought was unnecessary, including previously-untouchable elements like the sign and the "Reason" text. I also decided to scale back on the number of colors used. Again, nothing is sacred and you have to be willing to get rid of things you think are good but just aren't working. After a bit of work I had it boiled down to this:
I felt close now, but the text at the top still bugged me. I reduced the number of colors more and went back to an old design stand-by of mine, the banner. For the first time, it felt finished.
But not for long. I left it alone again, came back to it, and this time it didn’t look as resolved as I remembered. If my mantra was “simplify,” why was there still that graphic noise in the background? I had tried to avoid gradients up until this point (for some reason, possibly involving my design education and preference for analog vs digital) but I tried it on the background and really liked the result. Antoine mentioned that the removing the “Reason #” text confused my initial message, that being that there are hundreds of reasons to preserve our environment, and after some consideration I agreed and brought it back. The banner moved to bottom, some colors were changed, and finally:
It was done.
I’ll post pictures once it’s printed and hanging up outside.
Tags: bigfoot, Design, poster
Posted in Portfolio, Process | No Comments »