This is a continuation in the series of designs based on the alphabet from our Creative team. Each post will include their designs and a peek into their process. Here’s a look inside Oliver’s process. Enjoy!
I’ve been really interested in photo manipulation art lately. When I say, “art,” I am talking about the kinds of pictures where you see photos of people or objects placed in settings that clearly aren’t real; fantasy kind of stuff. Searching, “photo manipulation art,” online will get you a whole slew of (pretty weird) examples:
Apparently, using a muted green/blue/tan color scheme is super trendy.
I figured applying this technique to a letter would be really interesting. I tried out a couple of ideas before deciding on the one I used for the final design. It was kind of a process of trial-and-error to see what would translate well for the final shape of the R. There was also a lot of hunting for good stock photos that I would be able to tweak to my liking.
To start out my design, I wanted to have a reference point for the letterform. I placed a huge R on the canvas to work off of.
Once I got a hold of a decent library of stock photos, I started cutting out rough shapes and placing them around an R shape. Here’s what the image consisted of before any adjustments to the cut-out shapes were made.
Next, the longest part of the process: adjusting color and lighting of each individual piece.
What I learned from this process is that if you want to trick people into thinking something looks real, lighting is everything.
–Oliver Greenbarg, Graphic Designer
