It was suggested that we complete this Design Assignment this week and I saw a great opportunity to work in the 80’s theme. I quickly Googled “80’s movies” to get the creative juices flowing before deciding on “Sixteen Candles” which is also one of my most favorite movies. I then went to Canva and began browsing templates and originally looked at movie poster templates but they were too busy. Then I saw the one I decided on, under school poster and it was so perfectly 80’s I knew it was the one. I then added the simplest image I could think of: a birthday cake.
Enjoy, and if you have never watch Sixteen Candles please, please, please do so.

For this assignment we were asked to create a poster for a movie or tv show using a single object to describe the events in the show. To coincide with our 80’s theme I decided to use the movie E.T. I saw the movie E.T once, when I was 8 years old. However, I felt my perspective was unique because I really only remembered a few things from the movie. So I took the most memorable thing, in my perspective, from the movie and created this poster.

The first design assignment I did this week was creating this minimalist movie poster. To stay on theme with the class, I tried to think of 80’s movies and their original posters. Sixteen Candles popped into my head, and I quickly came up with this idea of using a simple image of a cake and Photoshop 16 candles on it. 

The image of the cake I found on google images, and the candle icons I found on The Noun Project. That website has so many awesome icons to choose from for free! I definitely recommend it to anyone who is involved in web design. As stated earlier, I used Photoshop for this assignment, and I choose the pink colors because I feel as if it ties in with the film a little bit. Other colors I was thinking of using were purple or yellow. Pink is not my favorite color, but it works well for this design. 

This design challenge was to create a minimalist movie poster of a favorite movie of mine. Hence, I chose Marley and Me. A beautiful, but ultimately sad movie. And I guess the design is a little sad. This week is gonna be ROUGH. I’m not good at design. But I’m trying my best.

There you have it folks: the best I can do on GIMP. I really do NOT like Gimp. But for the thought process behind this, I chose a dog’s paw print to represent Marley. I added the blue background because I love that shade of blue.

Below you can find the details on the challenge:

? Still like that old time rock ‘n’ roll
That kind of design just soothes the soul
I reminisce about the days of old
With that old time rock ‘n’ roll ?

Bob ‘Melody’ Seger

I took a risk in interpreting this next assignment: Minimalist TV/Movie Poster. The task for this project was to “create a tv/movie poster that captures the essence of the story through the use of minimalist design/iconography.”

I started this assignment by searching through a list of 80’s movies until I hit upon one that spoke to me. I wanted to find one that already had a fairly simple and iconic movie poster, and for me that movie was ‘Risky Business!’ The poster for this Tom Cruise classic already uses minimal elements to represent the movie: A face with sunglasses obscured by shadow, a hot girl on a fast car also obscured in shadow, and the title in a script font angled across the page. The design makes great use of negative space, and I wanted to do the same for my remix.

Movie Poster:

As I dived into the black void of ‘Risky Business,’ I started thinking about what elements represent the movie- sunglasses, fast cars, hot women, the eyes of Tom Cruise staring into your soul. All of these elements are already on the movie poster, and I didn’t want to just recreate the poster that already exists. So what makes ‘Risky Business’ iconic? I got it! The scene where Tom Cruise slides out onto the floor in nothing but a pink shirt and socks and starts lip-syncing “Old Time Rock and Roll.” This is a scene that everybody knows, even if you haven’t seen the movie (guilty).

To recreate this iconic scene by using minimalist design, I pulled up the scene on YouTube, paused it at the time that I wanted, and did a screenshot. I then brought the image up into Illustrator and did an image trace by limiting the colors to just 2 or 3. I exported this image to Photoshop. There, I brought colors back in by using the brush tool and the paint bucket tool. I decided on the colors pink (of course for Tom’s shirt) and a muted blue to contrast. I wanted the pink shirt to be the central focus, or the main iconic element. (I also used the values of black and white, and the bold pink color for the movie title). I upped the levels as one final adjustment, then exported my image back to Illustrator.

In Illustrator, I used Image Trace to turn my image back into a vector. I then used the pen tool to delete extraneous vector points, and to create clean angled lines in some areas and funky organic shapes in other areas. This was the trickiest part as Illustrator sometimes has a heart attack when you try to delete too many vector points. My program kept crashing, and it was a frustrating step to do in my process. Alternatively, I could have drawn the shapes from scratch with the pen tool, but that would have been just as time consuming.

Once I got to the near breaking point of my vector deleting sanity, I knew I was done.

Final minimalist design:

Now that’s some old time rock ‘n’ roll design that just soothes the soul!

I had a lot of fun with this assignment! I chose one of my favorite movies, October Sky. It’s not an 80s movie, but it is officially October now!

I love this movie for a lot of reasons, but the main one (and my reason for a lot of the things I like) is that it’s nostalgic. I watched it for the first time with my dad and I associate the movie with him. Besides, it’s a pretty inspiring movie.

When designing it, I chose to go as minimalist as possible and just had a basic rocket outline with the two stars I, personally, recognize the most. I chose a blue background to represent the clear, blue skies.

I really like the finished product. It’s really simple, but I’m weirdly proud of it.

Here’s a pic of my cat for the end of this post. Just to shake things up a bit.

Here’s my attempt for a 3.5 star assignment to create a minimalist movie poster. The goal here was to use clean lines, spacing, and non-detailed elements to create a movie poster! I chose Footloose for mine. I knew what I wanted to do, but I’m not great at drawing. I came across a website called autodraw.com that had exactly what I was looking for.

On this website, you can draw a shape, and a bunch of clip-art like images will appear to guess what you are drawing so you can replace your ugly shape. I started to draw the iconic shoes from these images:

I positioned them opposite to each other like in the second image because I thought it looked nicer, and the font I used was similar to the original logo. Other than the logo, I used subdued colors for the sake of minimalism!