Graphic Design Posters

I’ve been taking a graphic design class this fall. We’re about to move onto magazine layout but I thought I’d share some of my poster work I’ve done before I’ve completely forgotten about it. Our first real assignment was to design a poster using the quote “If you can’t make it good, make it big. If you can’t make it big, make it red.” I played around with some grunge spread ideas but I didn’t really like what I came up with. Finally, I decided to try something clean and simply and I really liked what I got out of it.

Our second big assignment was to design a typography poster centered around a cinematographic quote of our choice. My quote was about the end of a film and so I thought that I might create a murder crime scene to portray it. When I was googling ‘chalk bodies,’ I came across the famous Anatomy of a Murder film poster by Saul Bass. I ended up taking my inspiration from the classic design.

Interestingly, I discovered later that I wasn’t the only one inspired by the original film poster. Apparently the Clockers movie poster got caught up in a large controversy over its extreme similarity to Saul Bass’ design. This gave me the idea for a final project for another one of my CAMS classes, innovation and creativity in mass media. I decided to do a research/graphic design project on the fine line between inspiration and piracy in graphic design (focusing on film posters as the case study). For the project I hope to make three designs based around the poster for Dial M for Murder or the Vertigo film poster, also done by Saul Bass. We’ll see how it goes.