Music Poster Project - Final Designs

Of course I couldn't just leave it there. With a week to go until the final crit, I had plenty of time to come up with a better idea, surely. Here's the first one:

I like the look of this one, although I don't think the concept behind it is as strong as my earlier efforts. I am rather fond of the Japanese emoticons. To make it even more Swiss, here's a red version:

Okay, so that's another new idea. I do quite like it but perhaps not as much as some of my other designs. Ho hum. Next!

We have a winner! This idea kind of popped into my head when I sat down and really thought about the lyrics in Psycho Killer. He can't seem to face up to the facts, he's tense and nervous and he can't relax... wait a minute... how about presenting this as a giant A1 psychiatric assessment form!

I scoured the 'net for various forms, especially American ones (Talking Heads are from New York) and then designed one of my own. The main section is a series of yes/no questions, such as:

Able to face up to facts?
Tense?
Nervous?
Can relax?

My personal favourite is:

Sleeping well?      Yes/No     If no, why not?    Believes his bed is on fire.

Oh how I laughed. No, really I did. Anyway, there it is. Many of the real forms had a barcode at the bottom. I saw this as an opportunity to add one of those cool-looking QR codes. If you scan this with a smartphone, you will be taken to the song on Youtube, so you can listen while admiring my poster!

Music Poster Project - Further Development

I decided to stick with the solid block of text in the middle of the page. I toyed with off-setting it slightly to cause discomfort but realised that it ended up looking like I had just designed the poster badly!

Anyway, here's the block of text set in Impact:

Then I had the idea to add extra psychosis to the text with a nod to Saul Bass:

Pretty cool but I figured it was just a bit too much, so I opted for a compromise:

Here it is in the middle of the page, with secondary information about the song/artist added to the bottom-right corner for balance:

I then tried a version in a disgusting green colour, in an effort to make the poster more unsettling:

There's something I quite like about this one, although it has a major flaw - the hideous green colour is not really very disturbing. In fact, it is quite calming... FAIL!

I do like the subtle radial gradient in the corners though, so I tried a version in white/grey:

Here's a closeup on the secondary data from the bottom-right corner:

That's much better. Now if only I could just leave well enough alone...

Music Poster Project - Moving Forwards

I decided to stick with Talking Heads' Psycho Killer from this point forward, and in particular the first verse:

I can't seem to face up to the facts,
I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax,
I can't sleep 'cause my bed's on fire,
Don't touch me I'm a real live wire.

 First up, I decided to take the "live wire" bit literally:

See what I did there? I thought it might be an idea to hook the wire up to car battery or something, so that it actually delivers a shock to anyone stupid enough to touch it. It's not like they aren't warned!

My next idea was to use a font that looked like stab wounds. The plan was to print this then cut the letters out with a scalpel, showing a blood-red piece of card underneath. It was a bit shit to be honest:

Why do I include my bad ideas here? I don't know. Then I hit upon the idea of having the text really tight and constrained to reflect the "tense and nervous" lyrics. I thought it would look good to have this little block of neurotic text swimming in the vastness of an A1 sheet:

For added tension I thought that the text should be uncomfortable to read:

Or maybe:

In the end I decided to use the typeface Impact and set it in a strict block:

This seems like a good point to end this post. The next thrilling instalment follows shortly, after this message from our sponsors...

Music Poster Project - Initial Ideas/Experiments

The brief was to create an A1 poster based on a song or a piece of music, using only type and no other graphical elements.

The first song I looked at was Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division. My first idea was a bit of a lame pun but there is something I quite like about it:

The typefaces and colours were just placeholder at this point, I just wanted to test the concept...

Bit of a painful pun but sometimes these things actually work really well. No? So my next idea was to have the poster ripped already to reveal the chorus lyrics beneath:

I chose Helvetica to reflect the lyrics about "routine" and how "ambitions are low". Seemed apt. Here's another version where the flap hangs down, giving the poster a 3D quality:

I then switched my attention to another song, Rip It Up by Orange Juice:

Nuff said about that one. I just needed to get the idea out of my head and into reality so I could move on to the next thing - A-Bomb in Wardour Street by The Jam:

Hmm. Didn't really see where I could take that one. How about some Radiohead?

There is something I like about all the overlapping 2s and 5s. Apart from that it's a bit shit. Then I came up with an obvious one for my favourite Radiohead song How To Disappear Completely:

And then I decided to pick one song and bloody well stick to it for more than one or two ideas. But that's for the next post...