Typography Portraits

These are examples of the Typography Portrait text and I think that this work is amazing to look at because it shows the lyrics of the artist that it is representing. For example, Rihanna had her portrait done and I think that it's quite effective. The idea of this was that the artist was told to tell them a song title of one of their own songs and then produce a list of songs that are used as inspiration to them and then the designer used this to add list of songs which built up their portrait. One song that seemed to have inspired Rihanna was Survivor by Destiny's Child. 

These portraits were done by a company called TBWA\Chiat\Day who were hired by The Recording Company to create a series of these posters for the 51st Grammy Awards. They were made generally in the Year 2009 for the February event that took place. 

To understand how this was created, I first of all looked at different posters of the same technique and found that for different people, there were different outcomes because of simply their chosen portrait and I think that the different looks to the posters work really well and I feel that working with text looks better rather than drawing and line-making with a simple pencil or programme that uses lines to draw with and also using a range of colour for this text works better than using one simple plan font because it adds a 3D look to it and also helps the poster have depth that would intrigue people to look at it and find all the songs that they may know. I looked at a simple tutorial to see if I could do something similar in this style of work and my outcomes are below. I like the way that they have mainly turned out because they seem to be almost in the style of what I have seen and I think that with more practice, I could end up with something really close to the examples above.

Ed Sheeran - Lyrics from 'Drunk'

Justin Bieber - Lyrics from 'Boyfriend'

Muse - Lyrics from 'Uprising'

Bruno Mars - Lyrics from 'Grenade'

These portraits that I have done have turned out really well  as I felt that during the process of making these portraits using lyrics from their songs, that I was using the wrong steps and that I was missing a step or a layer because the program I used was Adobe Photoshop.Also I like the effect that this has, it is like the words have wrapped themselves around the picture of the artists so that they are embedded within the shape of the picture itself. 

I would enjoy making this sort of design because with Photoshop, you can use pictures with a plain background and change the text layer to a range of colours that you like and then be able to make out different parts of the artists/ bands faces that you want to show in great detail. The best backgrounds to work with are mainly Black or white and the picture preferably has to be in colour that way you get the best results because otherwise the background really interferes with the picture itself, like the example below. However, I like the way that the picture can be defined with a black soft brush and picks out the different aspects and makes it look like it's been drawn with different variety of pressures.

Foster The People - Lyrics from 'Pumped Up Kicks'