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Quay Brothers Poster Series and Logo Development

Graphic Design, Illustration, Typography

A promotional project for the Quay Brothers, avant garde masters of stop-motion puppet animation. Since every frame of the Quay Brothers' films is hand-crafted, including the puppets and miniature sets they make from found objects, it seemed appropriate to use a hand-drawn approach for the logo and poster art for this film series taking place at MoMA in conjunction with the gallery exhibition.

Concept: As the Quay Brothers' work deals with uncertain, ever changing dreamscapes, my concept was to create a poster series that gives the viewer a similar experience, using the typography itself to create a shifting landscape that flows from one poster to the next.

Graphic Design, Illustration and Copywriting: Alane Marco

Student Project, 2012
Series Announcement Poster for the Film Retrospective, titled "Shifting Realities."
Single Film Poster featuring 'Street of Crocodiles'
Ticket Design for Film Series. Yes, we all know 21st century tickets are printed on a home printer on 8.5x11 paper with a bar code, but let's say it's back in the day when we still got to design ticket stock...
Logo Design Concept and Process

While I wouldn't normally use art this complex for a logo mark, it made sense for the Brothers Quay, twin brothers who are completely devoted to crafting every piece of work they do by hand. The creepy sensibility of their films and tableaux, their mix of innocence with inexplicable violence, sweetness with nightmares, could not adequately be expressed except by making marks on paper with brush, pen or pencil. Process-wise, I experimented with various techniques, including india ink on wet watercolor paper, india ink with bamboo pen on dry paper, rubber cement and india ink relief technique, marker, pencil and more design concepts than are presented here.
Final Logo for the Quay Brothers. The idea came from their 3-minute short, Dramolet, in which metal filings move around a miniature set, creating visible, sculptural lines of magnetic energy that radiate around objects. This idea of the invisible becoming visible, of one type of reality becoming another, describes much of the Quay's body of work. The final logo is one of my original sketches scanned from my sketchbook, inverted in Photoshop, with an organic background shape added. It is a deliberately imperfect mark, one that can be simplified at small sizes and as intricate as a spider's web at large sizes.
Original sketch for the logo, scanned from my sketchbook and color corrected.
Logo pattern for collateral and packaging needs.
Cut-out version of final logo.
Logo Exploration Process: A. India ink on wet watercolor paper; B. Inverse of same; C. India ink and bamboo pen on dry watercolor paper; D. Squared conjoined letters, pencil sketch; E. Rubber cement and india ink resist technique; F. Metallic distressed letters, pencil and marker sketch; G. Psychedelic type in doll eye, marker sketch; H. small pencil and marker sketches.
India ink wash technique allows the ink to flow and bleed into the damp areas of the paper. I was investigating physical techiques that would allow the letters to flow or connect into and around each other.
This photo and next: Rubber cement and india ink technique. First, I painted bristol board with a thin layer of rubber cement and allowed it to dry completely. Then, using the rubber cement pick-up square, I picked out the word QUAY from the rubber cement, leaving the paper exposed. I brushed india ink over the entire sheet of paper. The ink adheres only in areas where the rubber cement has been removed or did not completely cover the paper...
After the ink is completely dry, the final step is to remove all of the ink-covered rubber cement from the bristol board to leave behind only the ink. From there you can scan the image and manipulate to your heart's content in Photoshop. (See the Ghost Lights book cover project for more examples of this process.)