It’s a week before Christmas and I’ve just completed my 5th poster, this time for Star Tours in DLR. I’m glad I got to 5 posters before Christmas as my plan is to aim for 10 in total but I’m starting to think maybe this is too many? See what Mike thinks. But it at least means I’m half way there and I’ve been sent some images from a person on reddit from the new Tiana’s Bayou adventure, which used to be Splash Mountain, but was rethemed as it’s based on Songs of the South, a very racist 60’s movie.
Anyway, as I’ve said before, I feel like I’m at a good stopping point for the practical aspect of this work for now, and can start building on the theory side.
I spoke to Mike a few weeks ago about building an analysis model for critiquing the designs I’ve been studying and he pointed me in the direction of film analysis and Geothen analysis. The film one is a great path to go down and I’ve stated to do so. Mainly with an easy overview video on youtube to get the basics down, but I need to spend some time reading so things that will give me a greater understanding and view point to build that out.
The Goethen model was ‘interesting’. The reading I’ve done so far is about the 4 parts to this model, which starts great, and then goes on to talking about drawing the thing you’re looking at, which is great as this is what I’ve been doing already. The last couple steps however are a little much for me. I don’t know if it’s me being narrow minded, or something else, I it all felt a little pretentious and without use. I spoke to Mike a while ago about this issue of having worked as a designer for a while now, it’s difficult for me to not think of the solution to a problem, and then work towards it. A large part of this course is to fuck around and find out, but maybe imagining the subject ‘preforming a gesture that describes itself’ feels like a step too far for my nero spicy brain!
Anyway, back to the print. This is the second study I’ve made in which actual type faces have been used, which obviously means I’m able to put them together a lof quicker than the hand drawn stuff. Making use of the font identifier on Myfonts.com, I was able to find a few different types being used and use them in the designs. What was super interesting was where the designer had clearly used a type face for the work, but sometimes actually cobbled two together to make something work. The Starspeeder 1000 logo and the Lightning Lane sign were examples of this. I’ll have to check my .ai files to find the exact names, but they’ve used one font for the whole thing and then swapped out, say the ‘N’ with another font entirely! A very weird thing to do, but because the Goethen model of recreating the work I was able to find this out. I wonder why they did this? Or have I downloaded cheap fonts that aren’t the correct ones they’ve used? Who knows.