Colors

Harmony Type: Analogous Harmony

I chose these low-saturation colors related to brown, dark yellow and grey etc. to represent art history and demonstrate a mysterious atmosphere for the artists. Another concern is that, since the original portraits are of different styles and colors, its necessary to create consistency and harmony.

Typeface

LinotypeZapfino
Gagaille Premiere
Gagaille Premiere

Author: Anthony Beyer Why I chose this font This font attracts me because it creates the feeling of original manuscript or handwriting by the artists. Especially, the crochet-like lines within the characters are freestyle yet still creates pleasurable patterns. I think they look consistent when placed together with the portraits.

Linotype Zapfino (LTZapfino Three)

 Author: Hermann Zapf History1 Zapfino is a calligraphic masterpiece designed for Linotype by the renowned typographer and graphic artist Hermann Zapf in 1998. It is based on an alphabet Zapf originally penned in 1944. As a font, it makes extensive use of ligatures and character variations (for example, the lower case letter d has nine variations). With its many varying glyphs and bold, flowing style, the Zapfino design emulates the style one would expect from the work of an experienced calligrapher. In 2003, Hermann Zapf completely reworked the Zapfino design, creating Zapfino Extra, a large expansion of the Zapfino family designed in close collaboration with Akira Kobayashi. This font family uses Apple Advanced Typography and OpenType technologies, allowing automatic ligatures and contextual glyph substitutions, accurately reflecting the fluid and dynamic nature of Zapf's calligraphy. This font family comes in 2 font weights, with 3 fonts in Forte weight and total of 12 fonts in the family. The Pro fonts contain glyphs found in other fonts of their respective weights. Why I chose this font I use Zapfino as the headline of the poster. Its one of the most famous and favorable calligraphic typeface. The characters look elegant and graceful, which matches well with the concepts and atmosphere of the whole poster on which artists portraits demonstrated.

Audience
The poster is designed for those who have great passion in art / art history have some background knowledge in art history and artists admire the artists of different times, from different schools / genre want to know about famous artists

Design message
To memorize the artists and art history, I create this alphabet of 26 world famous artists. Due to the amount of letters, some of the great artists are not selected. I chose the current 26 artists based on a balance of their reputation, uniqueness, time, genre / school, nationality, and also gender (I tried to include more female artists). When I was dealing with the self-portraits or old photos, I was deeply moved by the stories behind.

In Edgar Degas self- portrait, what attracted me was his eyes. They look so sad, disappointed and ambiguous, but seem like still concerning and maintaining hope for something important. Picassos self-portrait is the most genius one I have ever seen. Beyond the abstract shapes, I could see his unique
1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapfino. 2013/10/8

skills in using lines and dots. More importantly, what was the great artist trying to tell through such a helpless, numb face of himself? Artemisia Gentileschi is one of my favorite female artists. The portrait shows her concentration and passion on painting. Judging from the facial expression and body position, she must be a determined, positive young women at that time. When I viewed the portraits put together into grids, what attracted me so much was different strong emotions with unique stories behind the canvas. And I believe these emotions, stories and life struggling (rather than pure skills or schools they represent) are what make the artists great over time.

Grids
A flower-bud-shaped grid was created to indicate the blossom of art and beauty.

Sketches

Artemisia Gentileschi

A B C
Botticelli Czanne

Dali

D
Jones

Edgar Degas

E
Kahlo

Fattori

F G H
Gauguin Hockney
Leonardo da Vinci

Ingres

K
Qi , Baishi

L
Raphael

Michelangelo

Ni , Zan

Oliva

O
Turner

Picasso

P Q R
Uemura Shen Vincent van Gogh

Savrasov

T U V
Xu , Wei Yerkes

Watteau

World famous

Alphabet of

Y
Most Important Artists of all Time

Zadkine