The Making of the Poster, part 1

Sketch of Poster

The initial idea for the Typographic Matchmaking poster came while I was writing an article (yet to be published) about how to effectively combine typefaces. I did some sketches, including the one above. The poster started out a little more topical and sarcastic. As you can see, it was at a time when Tipper and Al Gore divorced after 40 years of marriage, Tiger Woods had just been outed, and Chris Brown had been arrested for assaulting Rhianna. Hardly the romantic couplings of the current poster. After discussing these ideas with my wife, we decided the pairs needed to be less cynical and more timeless in nature. I guess my original ideas would make a good “typographic mismatching” poster, but then we see ugly type combinations all around us, and who wants to hang that on his/her wall?

I set about brainstorming different pairs and couples. I also spent some time doing google searches on famous couples. Here’s a list of pairs I’ve compiled that were not used on the poster:

I evaluated each pair for uniqueness, compatibility, longevity and notoriety. I also wanted to have a balance between public figures, literary ones and combinations from everyday life. This helped give the poster some variety and a few surprises.

In the next post I’ll write about all of the pairs I had to exclude because of copyright/trademark issues, including a design that I thought was pretty darn clever.

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