Hello and the retro poster.
November 13th, 2008 | by gordon |I was kind of surprised to discover that my poster design for the Retrospective_my exhibition actually made it through the beautiful exhibition held in conjunction with Kyoorius Designyatra Malaysia. Honestly, I thought that my poster is the most not-eye-pleasing thing and not-worthy to be exhibited in that beautiful exhibition thing.
Okay, the poster is really not a cool poster in my honest opinion. Robert Bringhurst advised on kerning; either you kern modestly or not at all. I ignored and totally rebelled against it. It took me only about 3 minutes to put the text together.
Typeface; it’s actually a typeface* made for a project with something to do with culture. Well, since I made it for a cultural project, and this is suppose to be an exhibition on the intriguing retrospective of Malaysia’s past and history, it works fine for me.
Plus, I really didn’t vote. Had to attend a very close friends wedding in an island far away. And I really did felt an honest sense of regret that I didn’t vote. It was an ugly one.
Point is, it’s not meant to be cool and hip. I love my country but I do hope for a better future for us all. I didn’t mean to be rude to all designers who think I did not put in effort and passion in my work. I felt a better projection of my voice on this subject matter that way; and at the same time test and see if that typeface works fine or not in 30% K under the worst condition (a poster on the floor!).
Lastly, chances are, you might have read the my biodata on the leaflet in the exhibition, saw this link to this site and wonder who am I; hello, I’m Gordon who did not graduate properly for real.
*The typeface was based on this really vintage signage my colleagues found when they were on that “cultural” project road-trip tour. They thought it was really cool and since we had someone in the studio who is willing to labour for it, why not? Tried to retain the proportions of the original typeface as much as possible; top contours were more angled while the lower ones rounder. The width of each letters had to be balanced, in respect of the ascender height because there’s no lowercase version for this.
Had to increase the metric kerning space of each alphabet in-respective of the nature which this typeface came from, the loosely kerned signage. So do not use optical kerning when using this typeface ok? It’ll look too modern believe me. Below are the reference images:
And some Fontlab doodles:
