Swearing Budgies of the World - Poster ideas

My vision for this poster series is that they will be A2 portrait, with the budgie in the middle of a nice bit of white space. The budgie will be "doing a swear", connected by a line and not a speech bubble. Beneath the budgie image I want to show some secondary information - the name of the budgie, his country of origin and a map showing it, just like you would see in those old bird-spotting books. Something, in fact, like this:



I printed a few of these out on various paper stocks, including some really expensive "Somerset 300gsm" that I bought from Penny in etching. I think it was about £3 for an A1 sheet. The poster looked pretty good but I wanted to make it to have a bit more of a contemporary graphics feel. I like the modern stuff alongside the more traditional cartoony illustration. So I redesigned the secondary information and positioned it bottom-right.



I really like how this looks. The name is in HelveticaNeue LT Std 55 Roman (24pt) while the country is in HelveticaNeue LT Std 25 Ultra Light (18pt), all caps. The little map comes from a big vector map of the World that I drew just for these posters (I couldn't find anything suitable to use online), and the QR code, when scanned with a smartphone, gives you a literal translation of the swear in English!

Here's a bigger image of part of the map that I created. Perhaps it will be useful for another project in the future too...



I did briefly toy with the idea of making each poster in a single solid block of colour, perhaps the dominant colour of the featured budgie. It looks pretty good on some of them, especially Pierre shown here, although for birds with two main colours it kind of fell apart.



I really do like the idea though and it is something I may revisit in the future.