Gene Lu

Dynamite Bus Poster

Note: Student Work from SVA's Type Smarts (a Continuing Education course).

Design Brief: Design a bus poster measuring 15" x 6" featuring one of your favorite movies. The copy to be used is as follows (from most important to the least): Movie Title, Directed By, and "Now Available on DVD".

Image
Final Poster

Image
Final Poster Applied to Bus

The Process

Image
Napoleon DVD Cover
I chose to create a bus poster for one of my favorite movies, Napoleon Dynamite. After doing a brief search on Google, I came across a lot of imagery featuring the Napoleon logo, which was represented by cursive handwriting on a piece of notebook paper (pictured right).

I thought, "Wow, what a great idea!". After some more thinking, I realized that maybe applying that same logo to the side of the bus would be an effective ad campaign / poster for the movie (remember, this project was assigned in a type class). I set myself on the idea and went out to do some research on MTA buses rolling around the city.

A few hours later...

Image
Bus Posters Galore!

Do you notice a couple of patterns to how the posters are positioned/designed  in the pictures above? They are all pushed up against the bottom-side of the windows and all of them looked out of place. If you noticed anything else that is noteworthy, feel free to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it :P. 

After a mini-session of spelunking for bus images, I started to chisel away at how I was going to execute this bus poster. First off, there's a scene in Napoleon Dynamite where the main character, Napoleon ties up an action figure (He-Man) and throws it out the window. For the entire bus ride to school, the bus is dragging He-Man along. Since the top of the poster was pushed up to the window (as seen in bus pictures above), I could use this to my advantage in recreating this particular movie sequence. The second ingredient is to design the bus poster in a way that it acknowledges the blue bar that wraps around the bus so that the poster looks more integrated. On a side note, why don't advertisers shell out a few more extra bucks to have a separate design printed out for MTA buses? You figure the extra bucks would make up for the added effectiveness of a well-integrated bus ad.

With the main ingredients combined along with having to recreate the logo with a scanner, Sharpie, and masking tape, and with a dash of the Napoleon sketches seen throughout the movie, I came up with the final poster design (up top). 

Afterthought
I realized that I drifted away from the goal of this project, which was to work on the typography of the movie title, but I felt that the concept was greater than the type concept. It was also an opportunity for me to explore contextual design (i.e. integrating the bus ad with the addition of the blue bar). Maybe (hopefully) we'll see some nicely integrated bus posters in the near future...

 
The Week < Prev Post   Next Post > Gama Flyer