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.