My daily lettering project rolls on. I'll post all these as a single collection once they're completed.
Intermission
While working on the poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey I began drawing a lot of letters. Specifically, I was doodling names of my family members and I was rapidly filling up a few Field Notes notebooks. As 2015 wound down I thought about challenging myself to create a new letter every day and post it to social media.
These aren't really drop caps in the traditional sense, but rather my first foray into really trying to nail down how to draw a complete alphabet, albeit one that doesn't exactly work as a whole. When this project is finished I should have all 26 capital letters, and numerals 0-9 completed. It's a really fun project so far and it's forcing me to think about what sort of rules I want to apply when I eventually decide to complete a whole typeface. Here are letters A-H, posted every day since January 1, 2016. More to come.
Designing a Poster - Process Step Three
As my interests lie with type and lettering, I wanted to spend the bulk of my time exploring how to best communicate the "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)" lyrics and their representation of mental deterioration. Rather than experiment with existing typefaces and trying to warp them to suit my needs, I grabbed a sumi brush, some black ink, and started making a mess:
I created brush lettering for each of the words on tabloid paper and set them aside to dry. My goal was to make as many iterations as possible that imbued each word with a restrained and "sane" look to a degraded and eventually desperate one.
As you can see the ink saturation varied significantly, too, and I was able to work the saturation levels into the overall concept of the piece. That is, the uneven nature of the lettering aided in communicating a degraded mental space. (My first passes were with a Sharpie Magnum, but I found that I didn't get any of the splatter I got with the ink and brush.)
If I could do this again, I would pick up some parent sheets of paper and cut them to the final size of the poster so that my type treatments could all be done on one page. I instead scanned each of the images into Photoshop, color balanced them and deleted the white of the paper (so that the files were only displaying the black ink), and then assembled the quote in Photoshop. This did have the advantage of allowing me to nest words into and next to each other by playing with the scale of each word, though, and in the end I am happy with how the lettering composition came out. Now what?
Google searching for Hubble Telescope images gets you some amazing results.
I won't reveal the final poster here—I'll save it for the next post, along with my thought process and some interesting typographic discoveries. The image at the beginning of this post, and indeed most Nasa and Hubble related images have been a phenomenal resource. Stay tuned!
Designing a Poster - Process Step Two
In rereading what I'd written in my last post, I somehow feel more able to communicate my true point in those last paragraphs. There is a symmetry to the emotional context and visual content in Kubrick's films that I'm not sure I need to echo with my work. The same way people end reviews of The Sopranos' final episode by cutting off mid-word (the final episode cut to black quite abruptly rather than summarize the show), I think there's a desire when it comes to Kubrick to somehow become the Kubrick of poster design, of movie reviews, of classical music selection, etc., until it's so "meta" that you can't tell if what you've made is born of sarcasm or not.
My desire to move away from something like this occurred while putting together some images of the sketches I've been working on. Below, you'll see rough sketches of how my idea for the poster evolved:
I'm moving fairly quickly while I'm sketching because, as I mentioned in the previous post, I've been thinking about this for some time and I've eliminated several ideas already. Obviously when I'm doing client work I try to sketch everything, good and bad.
An initial idea on the far left was to use the numbers 2-0-0-1 with some color overlay. Another idea (same image) was pulled from the book: Bowman's pod as it moved through an enormous sun, engulfed in flame and nearly invisible against the mass of fire. The center sketch is my first drawing of the lyrics to "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)." (At the top of the page is a sketch of the strong radio waves released by the monolith on contact with direct sunlight.) The drawing to the right is playing with the type a bit more and drawing out the lines to suggest change and perhaps depth, though to be honest the dot grid on the page is restraining the emotion I am trying to evoke with this design.
Below is my most final sketch (yes, I know I misspelled "Stanley"):
The use of type here is much more suggestive of the words I had initially settled on during my brainstorm for this project: anxiety, uneasiness, tension, depth, existential dread, solitude, the unknowable vastness of space, abandonment, awe, loss of mental faculty.
I had put this project away for a week—work was slamming and I do have a 10-month-old—and in looking at this again, it feels so much more evocative of the loss of mental faculty than anything else. In growing old we fear death at the root of all other fears: abandonment, isolation, etc. While HAL, it could be argued, is only a computer, he is the most advanced artificial intelligence in existence. Is his death dissimilar to ours? What happens when our minds degrade? HAL's death is just as compelling as Bowman's impending isolation.
I'll be posting a step 3, which will be digital sketches and concepts, and a step 4, which will likely be the finished work with my own assessment, all within the next several weeks.
Designing a Poster - Process Step One
Recently I was contacted by an old high school friend to design something (anything!) for an upcoming exhibition at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, New Hampshire. The exhibit will showcase independent (non-client) work by designers from all over the country, essentially explaining visually to the Colby-Sawyer community what exactly a designer does. I was really happy to be invited to such an exhibition because it's a great excuse to get some long-overdue personal work done.
What to do?
As I suspect is the case with many designers, I've had a project milling about in the recesses of my mind for the past couple years and had never really had cause to put it out there. I'm a big fan of the films of Stanley Kubrick and have long-wanted to design a poster for his epic film, "2001: A Space Odyssey." The film has many, many different readings—Kubrick was no slouch when it came to delving deep into the human psyche. One theme that's always resonated with me is mankind's place in the universe, how far we've evolved, how far we have to go, and the potential existential crises that arise for both the characters in the film and for the audience.
For me, one of the most powerful moments from the film (and the book) comes when Dave Bowman must deactivate (kill) the murderous AI system HAL 9000. As Dave systematically unplugs HAL's circuitry, HAL gradually reverts to his earliest formatting and begins singing "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)." HAL's ability to sing the song degrades from normal singing voice to a bass murmur that can't even be described as language. It's haunting and terrifying to hear—Dave will soon be alone on a ship that will never return to Earth, his only companion removed from existence by his own hand.
Pulling Reference
There are a LOT of fan posters out there and it's been really fun and interesting to review them for inspiration. However, most of these deal with the entire film; that is, the imagery is selling me (the viewer) on the grand scale of the film and what I would deem fairly shallow connections between primitive man, modern man, and future man. Here's a tiny sample of what I pulled for my mood board:
Various fan posters for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For me it's also just as important to look at posters and images from the original film as well. A recurring component to the images is a grid-like light effect. HAL and the ship's operating system is essentially giant set of disks that can be removed and inserted depending on need. All of them appear to light up, creating some dramatic effects in the room and also on Dave's helmet:
(L-R) The Server Room, official film poster, and Dave and HAL 9000.
Sketching
Before I start sketching I tend to write out a few words that I want to include either in type itself or in the meaning of what I'm designing. Since there are a million posters for 2001 and the film has been around since 1968, I'm not overly concerned with describing the whole of the film in one image. As you can see above, Dave Bowman's shock and awe seems to convey even the best designer's inability to do that effectively.
I've decided that I want the viewer to feel what I feel every time I watch Dave disconnect a singing HAL: anxiety, uneasiness, tension, depth, existential dread, solitude, the unknowable vastness of space, abandonment, awe, loss of mental faculty. Those are the words I wrote while thinking about what I want to convey, and I'll of course add and remove some as I go and more ideas come to me.
A Word About Geometry & Emotion
Kubrick's fascination/obsession with geometry, symmetry, and one-point perspective camera shots has been well documented. In the example images above it seems hardly accidental that so many of the designers made choices that reflected and complemented Kubrick's vision.
Many critics have also observed that Kubrick's films are fairly detached from their characters; that he often favors a detached storytelling style that works on a grander scale than one in which a characters' innermost feelings and motivations are clear and relatable.