Lawrence of Arabia Trailer

After my last post I was so excited I had to go and watch Lawrence of Ara­bia again!

It really is a fan­tas­tic movie, def­i­nitely one of the best movies ever. If you haven’t seen it you are doing your­self a dis­ser­vice. Go check it out as soon as you can. To whet your appetite I felt I’d share the trailer.

Lawrence Of Arabia Poster

Lawrence of Ara­bia Poster

I thought I’d share the out­come of my poster from Ward Andrew’s Poster Design Work­shop I blogged about a while ago. Using his for­mula work­shop stu­dents were con­strained by these things:

• Pick some­thing (music/movie/book etc…) that you really love.
• Pick one color.
• Pick one font.
• Pick one image/graphic.

Once you had a topic you were to syn­the­size  why you love your choice in five words or less, from there you cre­ated a poster pro­mot­ing your topic within the mate­r­ial constraints.

I picked David Lean’s clas­sic Lawrence of Ara­bia, eas­ily one of my favorite movies. My quick sum­mary of what I love about the film came down to the idea that it is “epic yet per­sonal.” Lawrence of Ara­bia is a film set on a grand his­tor­i­cal set­ting, with mas­sive pro­duc­tion val­ues, a huge cast and yet at the end of the day it is really a per­sonal story about the con­flicted actions, ethics and motives of a sin­gle man. I chose Adobe Illus­tra­tor as my tool of choice for this project, and so armed with my topic and my tools I set to work.

I picked a deep orange sig­ni­fy­ing heat, the sun and the Ara­bian Desert where the film is set.1  Con­trast­ing this I used neg­a­tive space to give def­i­n­i­tion to the char­ac­ter and the dunes. Since we weren’t allowed to use shad­ing I used the thick­ness of the lines to give the illu­sion of the depth, mak­ing the end­less dunes recede into the desert. That was meant to sig­nal the epic nature of the film. I con­trasted the vast desert with a soli­tary man (T.E. Lawrence). He is face­less, denot­ing the ambigu­ous nature of the char­ac­ter.  I used Adobe Caslon Pro to give it an epic and time­less feel. The final touch was to add a lit­tle sand tex­ture over­lay­ing the desert imagery giv­ing the poster a more organic feel.

I tweeted my poster to Ward Andrews and he tweeted back:

…love how the lines get thin­ner cre­at­ing dis­tance in a 2D illus­tra­tion. - Source

So good, that part made sense! It was a very fun, chal­leng­ing and worth while work­shop. You should try it. Also, please see more of my design exper­i­ments on my daily designs flickr set and let me know what you think.

1. The film was actu­ally shot in Jor­dan but it was meat to depict events that actu­ally hap­pened through­out the Ara­bian Peninsula.

Design Something Everyday 9/365

Noth­ing is written…

An homage to one of my favorite movies, David Lean’s mas­ter­piece Lawrence of Ara­bia, done in moti­va­tional com­puter desk­top wall paper style. A film that was truly meant for the big screen.