Hello and welcome! I just turned 30 and while it was “scaring” me when I was in my early 20s, I’ve realised in recent years that I’m way more confident in myself starting this decade than I did the previous one. Also you can’t stop the passage of time so you might as well just embrace it!
I’ve been working on…
Stuff that I can’t show yet, sorry! But I also made my first film poster! It was for a friend’s short film called “Le Marchand” (“The Merchant”). He first sent me the landscape photo below, which has great composition and immediately gave me the idea to align the title to the strong diagonal lines.
I first tried to make the title and credits part of the decor but my friend thought the gradient at the bottom clashed too much with the rest of the image. He also thought the typeface I picked didn’t look sci-fi enough. Fair enough! In an early version I had already tried to mesh the title with the structure in the background so I went back to this idea and scoured my font library to find a more fitting option. And that’s the final result! It was a lot of fun working on this and my friend is quite productive so we should be working together again in the future. So if you ever make a film and need a poster, you know I’m your guy!
Cool free fonts
For this month, a bit of a theme with a selection of sans serif. I personnally prefer sans serif typefaces simply because I’m a Swiss style fanboy. So whenever I can I’ll stick to the simplicity and efficiency of a sans serif typeface. Here’s a selection including personal favourites and a recent find.
Barlow: a grotesque typeface with a round aspect that just feels nice to look at!
Overpass: inspired by the letterforms used on American highway signs. The bevelled ascenders and descenders are a great touch.
Mohave: a narrow and tall typeface that is perfect for headlines.
Jost*: a tribute to the absolute icon that is Futura, updated for the digital age.
It was interesting picking fonts around a theme, it forced me to really look at the details and consider the differences between similar typefaces. I think I’ll try to do it more often, what do you think?
If you answer “yay”, let me know which theme you’d like to see!
When I don’t work…
I started reading Knights of Sidonia, my first Tsutomu Nihei manga. I picked that one rather than Blame! just because it has mechas and I can’t say no to a mecha. I was quite disappointed when I realised all the mechas look the same but hey, at least the story is good, right? Hmmm… The worlbuilding is fascinating, the visuals are incredible (although the art style takes some getting used to) but the narrative often feels off, like it’s struggling to balance the mecha spacefights and the human drama. The fact that the structure of these spacefights is very repetitive doesn’t help: belligerent aliens are detected, mechas are sent to fight them, aliens have found a new tactics to destroy the mechas, pilots fend off the aliens but barely make it. Rinse and repeat. At least that was the case for the first 15 or so chapters, which are basically a long introduction to a complex story made of flashbacks, power dynamics, forbidden alien experiments and personal conflict. Now all the stakes were made clear and I’m feeling very invested in the fate of the Sidonia, the last bastion of humanity!
The final entries for the Alphabet Superset series are: yatagan and zweihänder. I’m really glad I finished this series, especially when I look at the first designs I made and realise how I’ve learned and improved both in terms of skill and process. I’ve started assembling a zine to gather all the designs, of which you can see the cover below. Now I need to figure out which posters to print and how many…
Having a theme like the Alphabet Superset was a great way to practice personal creativity on a regular basis, so I started another series to keep it going: the wards of Tokyo! Much smaller in scope, this one is a series of tourism poster ads featuring some of the most notable and famous landmarks of Tokyo.
That’s it for this month, thanks for reading and see you in a few weeks!
Fantastic work as always!