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!