THE MENU

• Final Posters
• Decisions
• Link to Part 1 & Part 2

FINAL POSTERS

►Poster 1: Chicken

Quote: “So how the turkey leg? Ok lor, bigger than your chicken but more dry.”

►Poster 2: Doodle

Quote: “Later I show you my super polished, hyper finished doodle.”

►Poster 3: Shadow

Quote: “Last night I dreamt that I became a shadow.”

DECISIONS

For this set of posters, I decided to be minimal about them – no textures, with clean and crisp edges.

Writing the Letters: Process

I used Photoshop to write the letters. I often draw with Photoshop and I felt that the effect created through creating letters and manually warping with Photoshop is an extremely different experience compared to creating them on Illustrator. (But it could be due to my lack of experience with Illustrator as well which was something I realised after an office consultation… I promise I’ll practice more!)

Photoshop also provides an extremely different experience compared to writing on a traditional medium, so I decided to start working on them traditionally with thumbnails first, before scanning them in and writing over them or shaping and smoothing them out on Photoshop.

After achieving the effect I wanted on Photoshop, I ported them over to Illustrator and live-traced them, before cleaning and refining them in Illustrator again.

Layout and Composition

It was difficult creating a structured, yet unexpected composition. It’s much like talking to someone else – you can’t really predict what they’re going to say.

I intended for the posters to have a subtle point-of-view element and wanted the words to be the imagery and carry the tone of the dialog to depict how they were spoken. To convey the dialog’s human element, I chose whimsical and engaging layouts, as if they are engaging in a conversation with someone.

In Shadow and Doodle, the words are meant to be engaging with the viewer, flowing towards the viewer. In ‘Chicken’ where there are two persons conversing, I intended us to be the onlooker, a 3rd person, observing two parties talking.

Shadow has a couple of extra graphical elements other than the letters – the swirl, the hands and the graphics replacing ‘I’ – to show that ‘I’ have turned into something else.

I created the swirl to emulate the feeling of falling into deep sleep pulling you in. It’s the feeling of sinking down into a pillow after a long day and feeling like your consciousness is detached from your body.

Chicken is a little more direct. The words are shaped into a thick turkey and a smaller chicken, standing on hills akin to a farmland on a nice noon.

(Thinking about it, this dialogue is growing weirder every time I look at it; I personally think that turkey meat is more dry than chicken meat…)

Finally there is Doodle. I wanted the huge words in the middle to create expectations and draw eyes, and the smaller text ‘later I show you’ and ‘doodle’ to let you down (smoothly). The yellow circle is used as a spotlight, to draw attention to what ‘i show you’ is trying to preempt.

Color Choice

I chose to go with black, yellow, magenta and blue – basically CMYK. They are stark and I absolutely loved how loud they are beside each other.

I did try to reduce to less colors or try other palettes, but I feel like it just wouldn’t be just as loud without any of them. Like how the cyan/blue provides a counterbalance to the magenta and yellow in order to create a striking image.

To make the posters fit as a set and work in harmony, the tones are also to a milder version of the original CMYK.

TAKEAWAYS

Having wanted to experiment with drawing the letters and to train my eyes to be better at compositing, I’m quite happy with how they turned out despite not having expected to go this minimal at first. Since I’m obsessed with details in drawing and I enjoy maximalist art and posters, I was terrified of being minimal. I do see the appeal now and I’m definitely a whole lot more comfortable with exploring minimalism!

Granted, my posters are not exactly minimal, but they’re worked on with the thought of what I could subtract. It took me away from my usual train of thought since instead of thinking of what I could change and add to make it work, I had to keep thinking of what I could subtract and lose, but still convey what has to be said.

It was a really fun project! I learnt a ton and I’ve enjoyed working on all the posters even though it took me ages to work on lettering them. It makes me think that it’ll be so nice to get more writing practice soon too!

LINKS

Part 1 (Dialogs, Research and Thumbnails): https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/laum0005/typography-i-assignment-2-the-walls-have-ears-part-1-3/

Part 2 (Drafts, Feedback and Revisions): https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/laum0005/typography-i-assignment-2-the-walls-have-ears-part-2-3/