Hans zimmer - Music Poster
Visual Communication Assignment - PDIDM VC Griffith College
As part of a recent project, we were assigned to create a music poster. Choosing a musical act, the genre, and additional information was our own creative decision. We were instructed to only use shapes and forms, and to concentrate on typography. We were not allowed to use photographic elements.
For this assignment, the focus was on typography, so I wanted to create my own custom font. I had ideas for a font based around musical symbols (quavers, beam notes and crotchets etc) which can be seen here:
I created this typeface, seen below, based on those shapes and forms. As I continued designing the type, it instantly became a serif font. I realised I would need to use and pair it with a musical act that would suit the modern twist on the classical typeface. This is where I got the idea for a poster for Hans Zimmer. He is a modern composer with roots buried in classical music. He is known for integrating electronic music sounds with traditional orchestral arrangements.
A time lapse of the process of the Typeface Design can be seen here:
After creating the typeface, I tried to incorporate Staves, which are the 5 parallel horizontal lines on a sheet of music where the musical notes are placed to indicate the pitch. So I added them behind the main text, and used similar stave lines throughout the rest of the design, not as obvious, but hinted upon. These are coloured using the palette and the opacity was turned down to filter them further into the background.
Hans Zimmer is known for writing over 200 scores during his career to date (original music written specifically for film). So I wanted to create a poster that resonated with that background of film, so I decided to base my design on the movie Interstellar, which Zimmer wrote the film score for. So my design was based on the colour palette of the movie and soundtrack album, which can be seen here:
The background is made up of painted brush strokes with a gaussian blur added, and a custom vignette added to feather out the colours. Then I added noise to create the galaxy effect to tie the background into the movie. The contrast between the black and galaxy colour worked well and captured the mood of the artist’s genre of music perfectly. Next I wanted to add a soundwave effect as the main graphic, but I decided to create a custom dynamic wave line to mimic the soundwave (and spotify code) that would also work with the space theme. I added a gradient in line with the colour palette also. I played with adding more elements like a silhouette drawing I did (from the movie poster), and maybe adding a Spotify URL code but it cluttered the design and took away from the poster and the effectiveness of the dynamic soundwave. I also added the QR code to take you to his website using InDesign, and then added the radial gradient to tie it into the design. I also created the star shape used for the critics quotes using photoshop.
The sans-serif typeface I used for the other text was named ‘Gobold’, and I used the different family of fonts to add hierarchy to the design and readability of the poster, while changing the weight, kerning, height, spacing and leading. I tried adding different colours to the text but the white worked well and was the best contrast against the off-black, never ending galaxy of the background.
