Designing a poster every day

December 2019, I've decided to start designing a poster. One, every day.

But why?

I saw a Video on YouTube about this by The Futur featuring Roy Cranston. After watching it, I sat down in front of my PC and just started.

I will only drop in a couple of pictures in this article. If you want to see all, you can check them out on my Instagram!

The Beginning

As one can imagine, my first posters weren't great. As every skill you haven't spent a lot of time mastering yet. And if you don't hate the work you did in the past, you haven't grown as much as you probably hoped. Either that, or you've mastered something and there is litteraly no way you can do better.

I for one really dislike my first poster.

My goal was to find a word, beginning with the letter "A" and create a poster about that. This word was air.

I tried to make some semi-translucent letter which interacts with the environment. So this is a mixture of 3D-work and compositing. As I'll show you in a bit, I really like the theme and did a couple of letter posters like this.

From this point on, I tried to be as experimental as I could. Until the day of the "O". That day, I saw the image of the dark alley, and instantly knew what I wanted to do with it. And as faith would have it, this poster would become the most popular out of all my Type-Challenge posters.

The method I used to create this poster is pretty simple.

I created a text-object in Blender, extruded it, applied a material. Just that would of course not convincing at all. So, I've approximated the camera-position with fSpy and placed all the lights manually. Rendered it, some noise and a shadow ― that's it. In an optimal world, I would've used an HDRI and not a "perfect" O, but we aren't. 😉

The extended journey

When I was finished with all the letters and numbers, I wanted to continue making posters. I just chose whatever topic I wanted. That was actually the hardest part for me ― finding something to make a poster around.

How the posters were recieved was very hit-or-miss again. It has probably something to do with the topics I ultimately chose.

I've tried putting a greater focus on the composition of the posters. The overall style of the posters was also much closer to Roy Cranston's. In hindsight, it's a pretty interesting observation that these posters have a much more thought-out typography than the posters of the litteral typography-challenge. I haven't used 3D compositions for my posters at all by the way.

I still really like this poster. The glitch-aesthetic turned out really well in my opinion. As well as the typography-contrast and focus point. Though it seems slightly nudged too far to the right.

This poster (unfortunately) aged quite well.

I've created this one at the beginning of the pandemic of 2020. For me, the details such as texture, chromatic-abberation, interaction between the text and image and the color-scheme really bring this poster together.

I really had a lot of fun creating these posters, and I hope you had some fun reading! :) In case you are interested in poster design in any way ― please challenge yourself as well. You'll be able to look at your beginnings with pride of how far you've come.