Six degrees of separation - development of initial poster visuals

Forming shapes from visuals 

I decided to start the poster design for my chosen graphic designers by producing some shapes that I traced from small details in their work; above are some shapes taken from Shiego Fukuda and Wes Wilson's work. This allowed me to abstract my visuals from their designs in order to create subtle references to their own work. What I found is that the rounded shapes looked a lot nicer, as they almost merged as one. 

Using shapes with collaged material 

Initially, I visually explored each artist by using these shapes to cut out collaged material in order to capture their work/style. I did this by hand somewhat messily, as I wanted to provide a slightly rough effect which would be difficult to produce digitally. I also did a little experimentation with how the text could work. However, these initial designs weren't made with any idea of composition in mind, which I later developed. In order to test out colour schemes and visuals, I printed on various paper stocks such as neons and gridded paper, as well as inverting the image. I actually really like both the gridded paper and the inverted version, as it looks more visually striking and abstracted from the artists work.

Comic book style 

I was suggested in some feedback to explore the composition/ layout of comic books, as very graphic, almost cartoonish aesthetics were an overarching theme in all of the designers work. I like this idea as it is a nice way to visually show the links as the format of a comic book serves as a timeline for the links between the designers. I decided to use the collages I made previously, but cropped and enlarged to fit each comic strip box; I kind of like the way that some boxes have more negative space than others, and I made the decision to have some boxes larger for designers who stand out in the links. The issue with these initial designs however, is that I feel like they don't scream comic book style, and are slightly too detached from those kind of visuals. I think that I need to try altering the scaling of the images, and maybe introduce more comic book references - like text maybe? Linking to this issue, I was suggested that I could add rectangles in replacement of words to show an abstracted reference to captions in comic books.