Character-based posters

Celebrity chefs

We were asked to design 4 posters representing 4 authors or books, where the focus is on the character, not the story or the subject. We look at Stylorouge's work and how they achieved this with the iconic poster they designed for Trainspotting. It was ground-breaking at the time (in the 1980's) as previously all film posters had a visual hierarchy of characters, with full colour, overlapping images. It spawned a million immitations. It worked so well because nothing like it had been done before with most films having stereotypical charcter shots, overlapping and arranged in hierarchical fashion. It shows all the charcters at an equal level of importance and focusses on them as people and characters.

I created posters for 4 celebrity chefs. I used high resolution photos from the internet, removed the backgrounds with a combination of Photoshop tools, and used threshold to achieve the look I wanted. I then used InDesign to layout the designs. I used American Typewriter for their names, and Antique Olive for the body copy. I felt these typesfaces complmented each other well. I chose orange as it contrasts well on the black and white areas of the images. The taupe sidebar was chosen to bring some warmth and contrast to the design. There is a clear hierarchy in the typography. The Jamie Oliver poster is the least successful as I could not find picture of him with suitably dark shoulders, with his head at the right angle.

My final design was changed by removing the sidebar, creating a box around the body copy and adding a visual full stop (the orange rectangle) which also acts as repitition. I think the designs now look more striking with improved contrast. The black box under the text makes the type legible now.