I’ll be honest: I don’t know much about graphic art. I’ve seen it. I’ve spent a lot time wandering the rooms of the MoMa looking pensive, and ds106 is currently producing a lot of hot art. But nothing has made me appreciate graphic art more than designing a minimalist movie poster.

With this assignment I wanted to experiment with texture and shape. It took me a while to figure out what movie I wanted to do, but I finally settled on the Pirates’ movie Dead Man’s Chest. Second, I needed to watch the movie again (very necessary). While I was watching the film, think I was drawn to the character Jack Sparrow’s face painting as the Cannibal King.

It is a key scene to the film. The character Jack is finally found on a remote island but is in a tight spot. The plot twist means that the character Will Turner must not only escape from the island himself but must also rescue Jack from the Cannibals.

The Design

I wanted to poster to look like a ghostly pirate treasure map. First, I search for an image in The Google for a photo of tea stained paper. I found one easily and downloaded the imaged into GIMP.

Next, I found an icon of an eye in the NounProject. In GIMP I altered the color of the eyes from black to brown. Next, I needed to draw the lines. In order to draw straight lines in GIMP select the paint brush tool, hold down shift key, and click the spot where you want to line to end (keep holding that shift key).

Next, I added the text to the poster. Last, I uploaded the image to Picnik in order to alter the tint of the color. I added a green color filter to achieve to the ghostly effect.

The Results

DS106 has produced a lot of fantastic designs for this assignment. Some examples can to found here, here and here. I did fret for a long time trying to get the lines in the design to be perfectly symmetrical. There are close, but not perfect. Overall, I am pleased with my work.

For my final design assignment, I chose to do the Minimalist TV Poster. I thought a long time about which movie to do; I had really wanted to do an older movie, but I couldn’t think of any (that I’d seen, at least) that had a simple enough iconic image that I could use for a poster. I decided to just look at IMDB’s Top 250 Movies list for ones I had seen.

I selected City of God, which came out in 2002. In case you don’t know anything about it, it is about two boys growing up in Rio de Janeiro through the 1960s and ’70s, surrounded by an atmosphere of violence and gangs. One boy grows up to be a journalist and photographer; he is represented by the camera. The other boy turns to drug dealing and violence, and he of course is the bullet – aimed at the camera. It’s a really great and very intense movie, so I tried to keep the poster as simple and stark as possible.

As for creating it:

I used these two photos for the bullet and the camera:

I used the lasso tool in GIMP to cut them out of their respective pictures. For the camera I put it into black and white and used the Posterize tool to remove as much color as possible. The posterize tool didn’t work as well on the bullet, so I just put it into black and white and heightened the contrast as much as possible.

Fonts have been my problem all week, and they were a problem for me today too. I just couldn’t find one that I felt fit in with the image of the movie. I settled on simple Verdana, a bold sans serif font. I thought the poster still looked too empty, so I added the text at the bottom for a little context. The original movie is in Portuguese, which is why I mentioned that there are English subtitles.

Fun project and a great movie – I may have to watch it this weekend now….

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of favorite novels and movies. The process was pretty straightforward and simple. I chose the mockingbird symbol as the “essence of the movie.” I used GIMP to paste the icon in the center of the background. I used the clone tool to make it blend in with the background. After that I uploaded it to Flickr and added text in Picnik.

Design Assignment: Minimalist TV/Movie Poster

For this assignment, I chose to make a minimalist tv show poster from HBO’s True Blood series. I created the poster in Photoshop where I overlayed a tru blood bottle with a solid color and then overlayed inverted text on top.

If you love vampires, faeries, werewolfs, werepanthers, witches, maenads, shapeshifters or demon babies then this is the show for you. Right now I am on season 4 of the show and learning about witches of Bon Temps, Louisiana. For a good synopsis of the show, check out the video below.

I decided to try out the Minimalist TV/Movie Poster assignment. I wanted to do this on a movie that I love, yet havent seen in a long time – Evolution. For those of you who have not seen it, it is a comedy about a group of people who lead an attack on an alien organism which had landed on earth. Starting off as bacteria, it rapidly evolves into a threat to earths civilizations.

Instead of going for the comedic or threatening aspects of the movie, I decided to highlight the underlying principle – DNA and evolution. The poster features two plants, tangling into one another with a DNA helix in the middle of them. The word “Evolution” is spelled with with the helix being the “l”.

To make this, I used GIMP, copied images into it then used the text tool. I changed the text type to “Monotype Corsiva Italic” as I felt it suited the theme of the poster well.  I made two text boxes, one for “EVO” and one for “UTION” and positioned them beside the helix so that they were inline.

I took a crack at the Minimalist Movie Poster as my first design assignment. I don’t know that I really like the way it came out but I took too much time to not post it Basically, I love the movie The Notebook. Typical, I know… But, my idea was to somehow display a heart [...]