Movie Posters

      The final project for Vis Comm 1 consisted of creating three movie posters (a thriller, a romance, and a comedy) using the same title for each. We had to create a tagline that informed slightly about the pretend movie. This project challenged me to examine how type can convey different ideas or emotions, as well as examine how type can interact with imagery.
     To begin this project, I researched different movie posters. Some were from previously released movies, and others were from future releases. Three of my favorites were the posters for Beastly, Kung Fu Panda 2, and Red State. These posters combined typeface and imagery effectively and worked really well as posters.

      From there, I began to play around with layout on paper and then tried some on the computer. Not happy with the results, I did a typographic study hoping that this would help ignite some ideas based upon the type. I had to go beyond the given fonts in Illustrator and search online for fonts that would work best with my designs. Once I had the fonts mostly figured out, I searched through my personal image library to see if I had any photographs of my own that I could use for the project. Luckily, I had two that would work for the romance and the thriller poster. For the comedy, I took a photograph of a friends car. As I gathered images, I began to play around with different ideas and layouts.

Each poster changed completely at least once, but most often two or three times. If I would feel stuck at any point, I would start over on a new layout and come back to that one later to see if there was something from the old design that I could salvage. I finally settled with these three designs:

Louise Fili

With this project, I found myself faced with a fairly daunting task: to design a logo for an established designer or typographer. I began researching from the list provided to the class and found Louise Fili. I loved her work form the beginning with its vintage and fanciful feel. I explored her website, taking in her work and her style to help me figure out which aspects to mimic in the logo design. Next, I started locating more decorative fonts from 1001freefonts.com to use for the logo. I exhausted my font library and headed to the internet to find more because I had yet to find the right font. Once I gathered several fonts, I began to narrow down which fonts I did not like. I played with color and arrangement of text as containers and embellishments came into play.

I settled on a deep purple and a deep green as the colors for the logo as Louise commonly used these colors in her package designs. Little Lord Fontleroy NF became the chosen font as it had vintage and an art deco feel to it that is so prominent in Louise's work.

I liked the font with an ellipse around it in the two colors, however, I knew that the logo need a little something more. So I looked into the Adobe Illustrator symbols and found this florids vector pack. I took one of the symbols and modified it by only using a select part of the symbol. I did this later on for the bio poster as well when I wanted some sort of curly embellishment, but I wanted the smoothness and symmetry not available with a hand-drawn embellishment.


Now that I had a completed logo, I began gathering information for a biography page on Louise Fili. Outside of her own webpage, I had difficulty finding diverse information on her. What helped most was the Women of Design book that Evelyn brought to class. In that book, there was an interview that helped me understand her own influences and process.

With this poster, I tried creating the background image first and then adding the logo, picture, and text. This did not work very well as I soon found out, so I started over and typed out the information and then created the design around the text. Another difficulty with this bio page had to be the fact that Louise did not design posters. She designed book covers and packaging/identities for restaurants and food companies. Louise did design several books, so I looked into the layouts of the text and images in the books to help me figure out how to create the bio page. I created the border from a piece of one of the symbols in the florids pack to mimic her use of borders and containers. I played around with the placement of the type on the page and added the dotted line border when I had to shrink my type down because the font was too large. This left a lot of empty space that needed to be filled somehow, hence the dotted line to fill space while acting as a container for the type. This is the finished product: