After all is said and done, I am very happy with the finished product. Unfortunately the colors on the JPEG above don’t come through as well as they did in print and there’s a lot of fine detail that’s lost at this size, so you’ll have to stretch a little bit to imagine what the real thing looks like. I just got into Detroit, will be playing a set at DEMF tomorrow, so I won’t have time to put together a good case study on the process of creating this print until I return on Sunday. But I wanted to post this up in the meantime after holding it back for so long.
These Spirograf posters by Greig Anderson (Effektive) are absolutely wonderful. I love when people use techniques or styles that have laid dormant or were just overlooked as passé to create new and exciting design. Also check out the rest of Greig’s work, it’s all very good. Via ffffound.
It really doesn’t get much better than this poster by Tribal DDB Senior Art Director Sergio Moctezuma (Gigposters User: Moctezuma). I am having a tough time figuring out whether the type on the face is done by hand or if there is some complex type on path / warping being done in illustrator. Any ideas? Via FFFFOUND via Panopticist.
Seeing such talented artists spending most of their time working at massive corporate ad agencies always makes me wonder what could have been. What if a guy like this had spent the past 10 years creating posters and honing his craft, what sort of incredible art would have been contributed to the medium? That’s not to say people like Sergio aren’t contributing to our world doing what they do at the agencies, I just happen to enjoy this sort of work more so in my own selfish way I wish they spent more time on this sort of thing.
So by now you’ve no doubt seen this image. It was created by Shepard Fairey for the Barack Obama presidential campaign. It has received quite a bit of press and raised a lot of money. I really love this iconic image and have always respected Shepard’s work.
So about a month ago the Obama campaign contacted me asking if I would create the next poster and I of course accepted. After some rather grueling all-nighters working on it, I finally finished today. The print has been sent off and should be out very soon. It will be a limited run of 5000 copies which will sell for $70 each. For obvious reasons I can’t post an image here yet, but I will as soon as I get the go ahead from the campaign.
A PSB file weighing in at 2.77GB with nearly 1000 layers, this is the most complex, largest scale work I have ever created. The print is 23×40" which had to be created at full 300dpi resolution, so you can imagine the strain this put on the hardware resources of the new computer. But the new machine came through; it powered through a lot of major operations with relative ease and I can honestly say I would never have been able to create the illustration without this new computer, my old one would have choked very early in the process. I did have to composite some of the imagery in separate files and bring them in flat at the end, particularly some of the complex vectors which had to be created in Illustrator and then imported. Most of the layers in the file were Smart Objects which were scaled at double the actual resolution of the image, so it was almost like working with an 80" image. Because of all this, it was often very tedious, having to wait quite a while for even simple operations to complete towards the end of the process.
Incidentally, this was the first project I created from start to finish within OSX. I really enjoyed working with OSX most of the time, but there were a few hiccups, particularly towards the end. I don’t blame them on OSX though, they seem to be issues specific to Photoshop’s memory handling as they began to crop up when the image became very large (in excess of 2GB)..Here’s to waiting for CS4 64bit for Windows. All in all it was a pretty smooth process considering the sheer size of the data being tossed around in there.
It’s a great honor for me to be able to work with the Obama campaign and I am very excited about the impending release of the print. I’ll definitely post more information as it becomes available, I hear it will go to print very shortly, next week probably. Stay tuned for a comp.
Lightworks: a collaborative experimental exhibition by MIT students under the direction of Robert Preusser, Professor of Visual Design, Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 14-October 5, 1973
[Cambridge, Mass. : Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1973]
I’ll be doing a show at the Drake Hotel while in Toronto for FITC. Should be about a 45 min. set, doing the ISO50 visuals as well. Should be a fun night, see you out!
April 20th, 2008 – Toronto, ON, Canada Tycho / ISO50 Live @ The Drake Hotel. w/ DJ AIA + ROLLIN CASH SUNDAY APRIL 20 DOORS @ 8PM_$8 UNDERGROUND More Info
Update: This print is sold out.
