| 00:00 | I was asked to give a lecture on my
work a couple of months ago up in Santa Barbara
|
| 00:05 | by the local AIGA chapter and
they offered to let me do a poster to
|
| 00:11 | advertise the event.
|
| 00:13 | The fun part of those is that
you get to do whatever you want.
|
| 00:15 | They're pretty much like please just
design a poster. As long as it has the date
|
| 00:18 | and the time and the location, it can
say anything else or look like anything.
|
| 00:23 | So it was a really fun opportunity.
|
| 00:25 | The challenge was that I didn't have
very much time to do this because we were
|
| 00:28 | really busy, and I have to these kinds of
projects in my free time outside of my normal job.
|
| 00:35 | So I wanted to do something that was
hand-made and hand-built lettering because
|
| 00:40 | that's kind of what I'm known for
and something I really love doing.
|
| 00:44 | So I knew I wasn't going to have the time
to do something where I started out with
|
| 00:48 | something hand-built, hand-drawn and
then completely developed it to something
|
| 00:51 | really clean in the computer
because that takes too much time.
|
| 00:55 | So I sort of intentionally went
after something that was going to look
|
| 00:58 | hand-built and I knew that I can just
draw it and kind of leave some of the
|
| 01:02 | flaws in the final thing on purpose.
|
| 01:04 | So that's what I did.
|
| 01:05 | This is the final poster and it's small,
it's 11x17 and it's really nicely printed.
|
| 01:12 | They did a beautiful job.
|
| 01:14 | So when I started, I do a lot of my
lettering with like really basic materials.
|
| 01:19 | This is a permanent fine point
Sharpie pen and Canson tissue.
|
| 01:24 | And I started out by just doing some
thumbnail ideas about kind of what I wanted
|
| 01:28 | the poster to look like and these are
really loose, and there are just a couple
|
| 01:33 | of versions, so I did one loose one and
then I kind of draw over the loose one
|
| 01:38 | again, a couple of times to sort of
tighten it up a little bit, and then
|
| 01:43 | I retrace that one again, the third time.
|
| 01:46 | And right now, I'm starting to get a
lot more refinement in the letter shapes,
|
| 01:50 | but it's still really tiny.
|
| 01:52 | But I'm getting banners and the feeling
for the style of the lettering that I want.
|
| 01:58 | Once I get to something that I think
is pretty tight at that size, I actually
|
| 02:04 | make an enlarged photocopy of it which
is -- so this is like one size up on the
|
| 02:11 | laser copier downstairs, and
then this is a larger magnification.
|
| 02:15 | So you can see it's really, really raw
and all the flaws of my original really
|
| 02:19 | tiny drawing are here.
|
| 02:20 | So I take this version, which is bigger,
and I redraw over that again, so I
|
| 02:26 | take another piece of clean tissue and
I take the same pen and I start drawing
|
| 02:31 | over the top of this.
|
| 02:33 | I'm kind of experimenting when I'm here.
|
| 02:35 | I'm like adding some leaves and I'm
kind of working out what I think I want to
|
| 02:39 | do with the letter forms, liketo
where I want the curls to be and where I
|
| 02:43 | want the swashes to go.
|
| 02:45 | I might do this a couple of times,
like I draw this version, and then I'll
|
| 02:49 | draw over it again.
|
| 02:51 | Each time I'm drawing over it,
I'm changing things a little bit.
|
| 02:54 | Like I'm working out how these curls
relate to each other and where this shape
|
| 02:59 | goes and how it connects to the banners here.
|
| 03:01 | And I'm experimenting on this one too.
|
| 03:04 | There is a few more little curlycues
and some leaves that I thought I might want,
|
| 03:07 | which I eventually
eliminated from the final piece of art.
|
| 03:10 | So this one I've actually drawn all the
outlines, put the thicks and thins where
|
| 03:15 | I wanted them to be and then
started to color it in by hand.
|
| 03:19 | So that I can start to see where the
weights are and what the actual sort of
|
| 03:22 | overall color of the piece is.
|
| 03:25 | I don't really like where I drew
this S the first time, so I fixed it.
|
| 03:31 | And then I traced over
that whole thing another time.
|
| 03:36 | I also made some adjustments to the G
and to the relationship of the cap M and
|
| 03:42 | the cap C and how that relates to the banners.
|
| 03:45 | So each time I'm redrawing this, I'm
making further decisions about how I want
|
| 03:51 | it to look and how I want the
proportions of things to relate to each other.
|
| 03:55 | And so I was pretty happy
with where this one was going.
|
| 03:59 | So I drew over it one more final time, and this
time I did it in a much kind of rougher style.
|
| 04:05 | I drew over it with this but I left in
a lot of sort of lumps and bumps in the
|
| 04:10 | final drawing on purpose.
|
| 04:12 | Then this actually gets
scanned into the computer.
|
| 04:15 | So I take basically a high res scan of
this really lumpy drawing and scan it in.
|
| 04:22 | So from here on, I'm adjusting both
things in the computer and things by hand.
|
| 04:28 | So I take this final piece with all its
lumps and bumps, and I scan it into the
|
| 04:33 | computer, and once it's in the
computer, it looks like this.
|
| 04:38 | And my scan I've actually cleaned up here,
the original scans actually look more like this.
|
| 04:42 | You can see the smudges and there is
the sort of grayness of the actual scan.
|
| 04:49 | So I actually add contrast to clean
this up, so it becomes a high contrast
|
| 04:53 | black and white scan.
|
| 04:55 | You can see there is lots of funkiness here.
|
| 04:57 | So I do some of the cleanup in
Photoshop like I sort of adjust things.
|
| 05:01 | I zoom in and I might clean some of the
lumps up a little bit or places in the
|
| 05:06 | scan where the black doesn't come out
perfectly dense, I will actually make that black.
|
| 05:11 | So that I get in that pretty
clean black and white image.
|
| 05:15 | Then I kind of look at it and I look at
the shapes and I see where I got, and I
|
| 05:19 | try to decide if this is exactly
how I want the lettering to look.
|
| 05:23 | In this case, I looked at this G and
I thought oh, it's kind of hard to read that.
|
| 05:27 | People may have little trouble.
|
| 05:29 | So I thought I wanted a different
version of the G. So I went back to my
|
| 05:33 | sketches and I drew over my original
drawing and I created a different G,
|
| 05:39 | slightly different version of the
lowercase G and then I scanned that in.
|
| 05:42 | So that's a separate scan.
|
| 05:45 | So I just took that G shape and
dropped it in to the final, into an adjusted
|
| 05:50 | final scan, which is here.
|
| 05:52 | So you can see each time I've scanned
things, I've adjusted and cleaned things
|
| 05:57 | up a little bit further, so this is
getting a little bit more refined.
|
| 06:01 | And eventually, once I'm happy, at each
generation of the scan you can see it's
|
| 06:07 | a little bit more cleaned up here.
|
| 06:08 | It's got that adjusted G and I'm
cleaning up and making some of the thins a
|
| 06:13 | little thinner and I am adding a
little bit to some of the thicks.
|
| 06:16 | And then what I do is I place that scan
in Illustrator and do an autotrace of it.
|
| 06:25 | This one has actually been colorized.
|
| 06:27 | When it first starts out it's black.
|
| 06:35 | So it looks a lot like that.
|
| 06:37 | Then you'll notice there are some
lettering in the banners here that I added and
|
| 06:41 | that I actually decided I wanted
to not add that in clean type.
|
| 06:45 | I wanted it to also feel hand-drawn.
|
| 06:47 | So I went back and actually went back
to my tissues, and I drew that lettering
|
| 06:54 | again by hand and fit it into the
banners of the scan, so that it kind of has a
|
| 07:02 | really rough quality.
|
| 07:04 | And then I scanned that in and autotraced that.
|
| 07:06 | So by the time you're done, you get
everything is kind of hand-built, but it's a
|
| 07:10 | digital version of hand-built.
|
| 07:11 | So I'm getting pretty close to where I'm
happy with this lettering now and its all vector.
|
| 07:19 | You can see the outlines of everything.
|
| 07:21 | While I was working on the idea for
this poster, I was kind of playing around
|
| 07:27 | with some different options.
|
| 07:28 | They were at first interested in
doing this as a letterpress print job.
|
| 07:33 | So I thought, it would be really
fun to do kind of a split fountain ink
|
| 07:36 | treatment with one big sort of plate
on some kind of hand-made really rough
|
| 07:40 | paper, cardboard or something like that.
|
| 07:43 | So I was playing around with that idea
and when I sent up the original draft of
|
| 07:47 | the poster to the AIGA, they realized
they couldn't make a plate big enough to
|
| 07:51 | make this really work.
|
| 07:52 | So we decided to do it as a 4-
color process print job instead.
|
| 07:56 | So then I sort of changed direction a
little bit about how I actually wanted
|
| 08:00 | to create the artwork.
|
| 08:01 | So my original idea was this kind of red
to orange split fountain sort of almost
|
| 08:06 | like a little psychedelic, little
more postery feeling on like kind of a
|
| 08:10 | wood-brown background.
|
| 08:12 | Instead of doing that, I went to back
to Photoshop, and I have this piece of a
|
| 08:18 | mirror that it's a photograph of an
old vintage mirror that I found, that I
|
| 08:26 | actually just put the mirror on the
scanner and scanned it and it has these kind
|
| 08:30 | of cracks in it and it has a
lot of patina in the glass.
|
| 08:35 | So I tried to keep as much of
that as I could in the scan.
|
| 08:38 | I think you can kind of see I've
messed around with the color adjustments,
|
| 08:40 | adding some hue adjustments, and
playing around with the curves until I got an
|
| 08:46 | image that kind of felt like what I wanted.
|
| 08:49 | And it kind of has a really nice
silvery odd just sort of distressed quality
|
| 08:54 | which I really liked.
|
| 08:56 | So then I stated playing around with
okay, how I put the lettering in there, so
|
| 08:59 | that it actually has some
kind of beautiful quality.
|
| 09:03 | So here is my scan and I am dropping
it in on top and I can, if I basically
|
| 09:10 | multiply that, I can sort of see where my
position of my lettering is and get it arranged.
|
| 09:16 | And I knew I had a block of copy for date,
time, and location that needed to go down here.
|
| 09:22 | So that's my position and then what I
did eventually was I created an inverted
|
| 09:27 | inversion of this basic file.
|
| 09:29 | So I basically took the background,
made a copy of the layer, and I
|
| 09:36 | just inverted the color.
|
| 09:37 | So I have the negative of the mirror
lying on top of the positive, and then I
|
| 09:42 | take my lettering, and I make it into a mask.
|
| 09:48 | That way, you can see that what's
inside the lettering is actually now the
|
| 09:51 | negative or the dark version of the mirror
lying on top of the highlight or the light version.
|
| 09:55 | And then all the cracks that
come through here are then reversed.
|
| 09:59 | So the cracks continue through the
lettering and make it really feel like its
|
| 10:02 | part of the background.
|
| 10:03 | Then I wanted just a little
bit more integrated feeling.
|
| 10:08 | So I added a texture filter to it.
|
| 10:12 | I added a little bit of a deboss.
|
| 10:14 | So if you go there,
it's got a little into one of the--
|
| 10:24 | I am not a big fan of Photoshop filters in
general, but I love the Bevel and Emboss stuff.
|
| 10:29 | So I went to Emboss and I gave it a
little bit of a negative, just really slight
|
| 10:34 | super tiny to make it feel like it's
actually kind of inside the mirror.
|
| 10:42 | So this is the final Photoshop file and
I knew my final poster was going to be
|
| 10:46 | an 11x17, so there is
actually a little bit of bleed here.
|
| 10:50 | So I took this Photoshop file PSD with
layers actually, I didn't flatten it
|
| 10:55 | into a TIFF, and put it into InDesign.
|
| 11:00 | So here's our InDesign mechanical.
|
| 11:04 | You can see it, actually there is the
bleed and then there is the type that had
|
| 11:09 | to be there and it's just in black.
|
| 11:11 | So it overprints the background and it's
got the logos and things that had to be there.
|
| 11:15 | So it's got the date, time and location, so
people knew where to go to see me talk.
|
| 11:20 | So the poster was used to promote
a lecture that I did in Santa Barbara, and the
|
| 11:26 | title of the lecture is called Keep It
Fresh 20 years of Design, since I've been
|
| 11:29 | doing graphic design for a long time.
|
| 11:32 | The Keep It Fresh is a theme about how
to stay inspired and stay involved in
|
| 11:36 | your work after 20 years, which
some days is kind of a challenge.
|
| 11:41 | So it's basically an introduction to I
just talk about the kinds of projects we do
|
| 11:45 | and my involvement and the
studio in general, and how we all work.
|
| 11:49 | And I give examples and sometimes I
show a lot of the strategy that goes into
|
| 11:55 | the projects, sometimes I show inspirational
images and where we got the idea to do things.
|
| 12:00 | I mean I love getting a chance to do
these kinds of projects because basically
|
| 12:04 | I get to do whatever I want which is fun and
I don't always get to do that with my clients.
|
| 12:08 | And it gives me an opportunity to kind
of play and explore an idea that maybe
|
| 12:15 | I've been working on or thinking about
and apply it to something that I know
|
| 12:19 | will actually get printed. So it's great.
|
| 12:22 | It's fun, and it's a little bit Zen
working on things that are hand-drawn like that.
|
| 12:25 | I can sit during staff meetings and kind
of doodle, which I actually did with
|
| 12:29 | some of these early drawings. They
happened while I was listening to something
|
| 12:33 | else or sitting on a conference call.
|
| 12:35 | So it's a chance to kind of integrate
my own work into the design process,
|
| 12:39 | and stay connected.
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