Steal From The Best

This week I want to take a look at one of the first real design projects I worked on at Bradley. 

My first real creative process assignment involved creating a poster campaign promoting a local business in the style of a famous designer. The whole point of the campaign was to get new businesses to relocate to Peoria by showing one of the city's  diverse and successful businesses.  From the hat I drew: the forest park nature center, a local preserve full of trails, and Stefan Sagmeister, arguably the most famous designer working today. I began by doing my research on the designer. I had already heard him speak about his Happy Show exhibition at the SEEK design conference at NIU (he did not want to get his picture taken with me), so I was quite familiar with his work. I felt that sharp photography and rough inventive type really defined the artist. I attempted to incorporate the concepts behind Sagmeister's most famous works. His handwritten  Lou Reed lyrics scrawled over the musician's face is perhaps the most frequent image hit when you Google Sagmeister's name. And personally I have always loved the story of the intern that was forced to carve letters into the designer's skin. But I also wanted to include ideas from his more recent projects. 

But it was the rock star designer's exploration of typography with real world objects that I truly strived to emulate with this campaign. My one regret is that I had not been given this assignment in the spring or summer when the colors outdoors were brighter. This assignment lost a great deal of impact due to the bland color scheme.  I spent forever gathering the leaves and arranging them into the proper pattern. Plus, I picked the windiest/rainiest day to conduct my shoot. I had a deadline approaching and so I was forced to run around the park like an idiot chasing after stray leaves in the wind. I'm happy I persevered to get the shots I captured though. These are among my favorites of my earlier projects. Once I had captured the images, I brought them into InDesign and overlaid some smaller objects to write on top of. Then, I printed the pages and went the old fashion route by using tracing paper to hand write my type in a style aping Sagmesiter's own writing. I'm extremely lucky my own writing is so ugly and I could easily copy the style. From there I scanned the type back in and slapped the logos on. I am also pretty proud of the subheadlines I put on the posters. I feel like the relocate to Peoria is almost unnecessary, I could have got by with just the subheadings. Overall I'm happy with how this one turned out. I loved doing such a typographically driven project.