Part 1: Poster
My design hero is Experimental Jetset, a small studio based in Amsterdam, NL. The poster acts as both a lure and an introduction to the design hero, with later parts of the project giving further information.
Experimental Jetset has a veritable archive of work and various projects. Other distinct features of their work is strong typography, neatly ordered and hierarchical layouts, and frequent use of the Neo-Grotesque sans serif: Helvetica.
I overlaid cropped select images of their most distinct/defining works with the list of projects chronicled on the Experimental Jetset website (https://www.jetset.nl/) to convey the sheer scale through a flat, 2D poster medium.
The title text was done by taking vector outlines of Helvetica Neue in Adobe Illustrator and creating masks with the grid modules. The clipping masks allowed me to play with how much of each glyph I could hide until the letter was unreadable. I felt this was a novel way of approaching a very frequently seen typeface.
Early sketches:
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Very blatantly inspired by the cover of Jetset's 2015 Statement and Counter-Statement.
Experimentation with how typeface anatomy might play into layout & grid of the poster.
Here are the beginnings of that letter-cropping present in the final version!
A bit "on-the-nose" regarding their heavy use of Helvetica. Still, evokes their signature style nicely.
First foray into how I could catalog using type rather than images, as usually seen in commercial magazines.
I love red! I rather liked the layout & contrast of the serif type with Jetset's sans-serif heavy work.
Mid-Fidelity iterations/sketches:
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Playing with a different cropping of those Baskerville letter forms. Trying a layout with more vertical motion as opposed to the horizontal lines or large clusters from before.
Yet more test-runs of those serifs. Sticking to just text and no images for now, getting this basic framework locked down will set me up to do well later. Unsure of how the body paragraph and the pull quote are interacting in that bottom white space.
My affinity for the color red appears again. My largest issue with this layout is that it seems ineffective at the assigned scale (19.25 x 31.75 inches), even if it looks cutely demure at say, notebook scale.
Final trial to see if the serif cropped type is effective. I ended up preferring the starkness of the cropped Helvetica.
Considerations while making this poster:
Experimental Jetset emphasizes in multiple interviews on their appreciation of the material nature of print beyond just a 2D medium (as seen in the "turning language into objects" quote on their site).
The studio is heavily embedded in counterculture movements and its members grew up in the punk scene. A more sterile, 'corporate' styles might run against their values & ethos.
How do I convey the vast amount of work they've produced while a) avoiding hoarder-type clutter b) not emulating a sales catalogue and c) emulating their strong layout and typography?
2 or 3 Things I Know About Experimental Jetset