For my Advanced Graphic Design class, I had to make a design for a folding A1-size poster about any subject I wanted. I decided to express my love of Godzilla by commemorating his 70th anniversary in 2024. The front side of the poster depicts 5 versions of Godzilla from the 5 main eras of the franchise. The back of the poster details the history of Godzilla movies, showing the 5 eras and details about important moments in the franchise. I also created several illustrations for notable monsters from the series, which are shown on the back as well. In all, I hope it is a fun poster for fans of the franchise and a potential guide for new fans of the Godzilla.
In class, we were shown several folding A1 size posters made by different artists and designers, which gave us an idea for how a poster like this might be laid out and folded. I ended up coming up with a layout that can be read while unfolding it, yet still keeping the content facing the same direction so that either side can be hung up as a poster.
To gather the information that was put on the poster, I spent several hours a week for most of that semester researching. Most of the information came from Wikizilla and Wikipedia, if not straight from my viewing of the movies themselves.
For the monster illustrations, it was as simple as finding movie stills and re-creating them in Adobe Illustrator. I made them with two main colors to keep them from looking too flat, mostly with a dark-colored background and a lighter color for highlights. For the fiery effect on the front of the poster, I used an orange-transparent gradient on the buildings and created a fallout pattern with the glow effect applied.
Aside from stills from the movie, a lot of fan-art inspired this poster as well.
