Polish Posters

 Henryk Tomaszewski

Milan Grygar

There is something very blunt and direct about these posters by Polish designers. They look great as a thumbnail because of the very strong use of colour and composition, but also up close. They feel very instantaneous and 'off the cuff'. I want to bring some of these qualities to my poster work through the use of collage, bringing together two elements very quickly and simply with an emphasis on composition, in particular use of space and negative space.

Wallpaper Magazine cover by Sam Winston

For the last idea I took particular inspiration from the approach that Sam Winston took for his cover of Wallpaper Magazine in which he folded the pages up in such a way that you can see a little part of the entire magazine at a glance. He is playing with the magazine format to give an overview, in a way that isn't possible without the actual magazine in front of you. The form of the magazine is directly linked to the creation of the cover.

Watch how it was done below. 

Pulp Fiction development

Thinking about how to capture the essence of such a complex film in one image I thought about how I might describe it in one sentence. This quote from the beginning of the film does this quite well, as the various storylines are inspired by the episodic stories seen in pulp magazines. Because of this I wanted to try and take my poster back to the roots of the magazine and printed matter by using the physicality of the paper to create the artwork.

The concept behind this experiment was the intertwining story lines of each character and the fact that they are all connected although they may not realise. The stories are like threads that are woven together, so why not actually weave the characters together?

Pulp Fiction

The first of the competition briefs I am going to enter is one to design a poster for a classic film as voted for by the public; I have chosen to create a poster for Pulp Fiction.

I have come up with a few initial ideas for scenes that to me give a good impression of the film as a whole and also the striking individual scenes.

However, these are just drawings taken directly from the film, and therefore don't really say anything new about the film at all; I need to think of a way of combining the multiple storytelling elements of the film into one image - perhaps by using a similar approach as my initial Heart of Darkness cover.

BA8 - Heart of Darkness

For BA8 I will be tackling a number of briefs that I will cover one by one over the next few posts.

Heart of Darkness
I was originally planning on entering the Folio Society competition to design a book binding design and three interior illustrations for the book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I only had a week to complete this piece of work and because of this produced some very rough ideas on Photoshop for my tutorial (shown below)

Of these the first is most successful in capturing something of the atmosphere of the novel, whereas the other come across as slightly too playful. Although I was pleased with it as a single image I wasn't comfortable choosing this approach for the rest of the interiors and wanted to continue working in a similar way to BA7.

In the end I created a set of five potential images for the interiors.

I am very pleased with how these look as a series of illustrations (although the source images are repeated) and how they fit the overall mood of the book as well. Because of this I have chosen to carry on working on this alongside my other projects with the potential of it developing into a more major piece of work.