Lecture Poster - Si Scott

When I set out to design a poster for the upcoming Si Scott lecture, I started by trying to do his name in his trademark style, like in this example (Si's work, not mine):

I know all his stuff is hand-rendered but I thought I could knock something decent up in Illustrator using the twirl tool. It was going okay but it was also taking forever and I cam to the realisation that it would just look like a poor imitation of his work. Not only that, everyone else will probably be doing the same thing.

So I decided to try something else completely. First I set the text in a suitable poster font, in this instance Gotham. And then I got annoyed because I couldn't come up with any ideas. And then I started scribbling angrily all over the text. And it started to look quite good. But what really set it off was something to do with blind luck and good observational skills...

I had been scribbling in white over the text, so that the very fine lines only showed on the heavy Gotham font and they made it look kind of fibrous. Initially I thought it looked sort of like cracked ice, which was nice, but I felt the urge to continue scribbling until it got really detailed. Then, as I moved the cursor over the scribble path, I noticed that Illustrator highlighted the whole thing in that sort of cyan colour and it just looked awesome! So, I duped the scribbled layer and made it cyan(ish) and stuck it behind the text layer and this poster was born:

Here's a closeup showing the detail:

Funny thing is I have had a better response to this than anything else I have done in the last two years. In fact, after the lecture Nigel told me that Si Scott himself really liked the poster. I thought it must have been a case of mistaken identity until Si showed me the photo of it on his phone. Amazing!

Just goes to show that the tutors are probably right when they bang on about doing rather than just thinking.