A quote from Edgar Allan Poe inspired this project: “Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” One of Poe’s most famous pieces of literature is the poem The Raven, which evokes a dark melancholy mood. I wanted to incorporate an aspect of a raven in the background elements. When creating the background for this piece, I used royalty-free feather images, positioning them at desired angles and using different levels of opacity to create an overlapping effect. The dark colors were used so that nothing was distracting from the text. I chose different fonts to convey different emotions when working with the text. For the word impress, I wanted to emphasize the feeling of perfection or meeting expectations. The word horror had to be the break between the first and second half of the quote, so I chose a unique font and curved the text to add visual interest. Lastly, I wanted an irony in the font for the word reality, which led me to use a fanciful one.
