Original article on Jelly London
What’s one of your favourite projects that you’ve worked on? I did a project for The Oscars last year where the client basically gave me total creative freedom. Not always music to a designer's ears, but in this case it was. The client was happy for me to explore ideas right up to final artwork, which is the first and last time I think that's happened. It was a lot of work but totally worth it and produced some pieces that I'm proud of. The finished art was screen printed and given to celebs at the glitzy awards bash.
Talk us through your design process for that project. Lots of drawing early on. After exploring, I came up with the idea of creating some pieces by hand, using type printed on acetate, then manipulated and photographed, before being composited in Photoshop around the Oscars statue. I thought it would be cool to have the type cropped so it was bursting out of the frame, reflecting the nature of short films... snappy, punchy, full of life.
First, I created the static type in Illustrator (10 years+ of using Illustrator means my brain probably has an Adobe logo on it somewhere!), to be printed on acetate. I wanted to be able to play with the type physically while still keeping it legible, so I designed the type with elongated sections that could be looped, twisted and folded. I then composed the acetate prints in various interesting ways and shot them using a Nikon D80. Once I had a good amount of quality shots of the acetate type, I imported the images to Photoshop and stripped them back until just the type remained. It was then time to integrate the type with the Oscars statue graphic, used as a base for each poster composition. I played extensively with different layouts and colourways until arriving at the strongest pieces.
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