'alphabet soup'

'alphabet soup'

'alphabet soup'

'alphabet soup'

Poster assignment #1

There were a lot of lurid melodramas and exploitation films that came out in the 1930's (i.e., 'Reefer Madness). The film posters that went with them tended to be a bit dramatic. Whether they were actually meant to be 'educational', or just pretended to be, I'm not quite clear on. In this day and age, after the advent of the Jerry Springer tv show, Cole Porter's song, 'Anything Goes...' was never truer, and we're all a lot more jaded, but in the 1930's, these types of film posters probably had some visual impact. This is my salute to those types of posters.
I wanted to create a high-contrast between the background field and lettering, but I didn't want to use black, which would have been a little too clean for the feel I was going for here. I wanted to do everything possible to add to the tawdriness, and the background color ('botulism grey'?) is meant to add to that overall feeling. I wanted the visual hierarchy to go from the top to the bottom. The (fictitious) film title needs to stand out, but in this case I wanted it to not overpower the first word on the poster.

Typography assignment #1

I was looking for a feeling of motion with this study - of this form emerging from the mists, becoming more visually clear, and rolling/bouncing across the screen from left to right. The relative roundness of the letter G helped, as well as the fact that we normally read from left to right, although I actually constructed it from right to left, adding size and dimishing opacity with each new layer. It seemed important to make sure that the last 'G' was not upright, but that a sense of visual imbalance would suggest that the form just continues to move off the screen to the right. Working with varying layers of opacity was interesting, as well as noticing the different shapes that were created when they overlapped.

Collage assignment #1 - 'March of Progress'

I wanted to try to do a collage study using my small collection of vintage matchbooks, matchboxes, and cinderella stamps. The rawness and crudeness of some of these halftone images really appeal to me. When you enlarge those images, you get a feel for the visual process of the creation of those images. I also enjoy a lot of 'older' things, and both the funkiness of the images, as well as how 'dated' some of these things appear, create a feeling of a popular culture gone by, and history. The original Egyptian background with the sand, sphinx, and pyramids, came from a Danish cinderella stamp (it was an advertisement for some form of margarine). I extended it and made it wider partly because I wanted to include more elements, and partly because I wanted the other elements to dominate the Egyptian landscape. I was trying to convey a feeling of 'modern culture' traditionally not always having respect for older culture. An alternate title is 'Club Med - 1947'.