The aim of this project was to create a poster for the play titled Hamlet by William Shakespeare. The aim was to give it a more modern type feel to the play so I wanted to go about creating something that had both a modern sense whilst still keeping a bit of the play's style. Most images for the play Hamlet usually has someone holding a skull so I wanted to go with something dark and different whilst still presenting the skull.
Before I did this I went about creating the layout position for the type as seen below.
These were the typefaces I went with for the poster.
Once I found the font I wanted to use I then went about creating the image. The image I had in mind was to do half of Hamlets face with the other half being a skull. I sketched this out on paper first before eventually bringing it into Photoshop and painting it digitally.
This is the image I got once I completed painting it in Photoshop. However, once I ended up bringing this image into the poster to see how it looked it didn't seem to work because the image looked too flat. It was then suggested to me to try and make it 'pop out' more so I went about trying to do just that with the image.
I took the image, printed it off and cut it in half straight down the middle. I then placed something underneath the skull half of the image to elevate it and placed tracing paper on the Hamlet half to make the skull part stand out more. I felt the need to do this because I thought people would relate to the skull half more than the Hamlet half due to everyone knowing the symbolic meaning of the skull.
The covering of the face gave more of an indication of death and darkness to which I was looking for and also how the humane side of Hamlet was fading away due to his fury towards his uncle.
I went back to the poster then to try and incorporate the image into it but was having a bit of trouble figuring out how I wanted the whole thing to look like.
One frosty morning I ended up taking a various amount of photos of ice and felt it could help my poster bring out that chilling, dark feeling a bit more. From looking at this photo I thought it would work well showcasing the dark and cold feel I wanted and also felt it might give it a somewhat dramatic feel.
I then rotated the image 90 degrees and tried incorporating it into the poster in a number of different ways until I finally got the layout and tone I wanted.
Colours used in the final few poster concepts and final poster itself.
Once I had everything in that I wanted all that was left was resizing certain things to fit proportionally and changing opacity levels.
Finished Hamlet Poster Design
