For my second major project for QMx, I pitched them on the idea of creating vintage propaganda-style posters for Battlestar Galactica. It seemed a natural fit for a TV show that was essentially a war drama.
Despite having the license to the franchise, I didn’t have access to a lot of digital files for this project. For some projects, I get to wade through piles of digital art created for the movie, but this time around, for whatever reason, my resources were limited. That was both challenging and liberating, because it didn’t limit me to images that fans have seen countless times.
When developing these, I wanted to create posters that looked like they would actually be found taped to the bulkhead of the ship to motivate the troops. Despite featuring robots and spaceships, I wanted the art to look familiar and “true,” just like the show. It was important to me not to make these look sci-fi-ish. Propaganda posters are designed to pass along information in a simple, concise way, that the average Joe could relate to. I just needed to figure out what kind of messages the powers-that-be would need to pass on.
I looked at a lot of American and British posters from World War II, which had overriding themes of conservation of resources, unity of purpose, and vigilance against the enemy. Taking these basic concepts, which I figured would be universal to any conflict, I tried to come up with designs that could just as easily be found in a 1940s New York subway station as a stark metal corridor of a battlestar — replace the Colonial Viper with a P-51 Mustang and you’ve got yourself a WWII poster.
While the designs were based solely on my own ideas and concepts, I took a lot of the colors directly from actual posters, in order to emulate the type and variety of inks that were used at the time. I also paid special attention to the fonts I used. Typesetting at the time was much less even than the way computers today handle fonts, and tended to be spaced significantly wider than we do today.
I also added a lot of little touches like the ones I found on the original posters, like print-run numbering, authorization information, etc. In my experience, it’s the little touches like that that give a poster a sense of realism that really sells the design.
A month or so after these went on sale, my friend at QMx told me he had given a set of the posters to the production team at Battlestar, and they loved them so much, they promptly put them up on the walls of the studio, which was the ultimate compliment!
This was also my first product to be offered on ThinkGeek, and got nice writeups in SciFi Magazine, Gawker, the LA Times blog, and a ton of other places, which was really satisfying to see.
