I Write Sins Not Tragedies

2016 | Type Poster

Some of my earlier design work and one of my first dives into compiling hand inked work done at a small scale, only to scan it in at a super high DPI and create a lovely texture to the letters.

The black letter inspired type was chosen to fit the wedding theme of the specific song as well as the tone of earlier Panic! at the Disco music. Weddings often use flowery, delicate script, so why the heavy black letter? Well Panic! at the time was dredged in edgy, emo, thick-ass eyeliner aesthetics at the time and black letter felt like adding that “guyliner” to wedding scripts.

(see process below)

Inking

Once I had established the look I was going for, I pulled some black letter inspiration. I opted to use a fairly basic style for most of the letters but used some of the fancier styles for the S of “Sins” and T of “Tragedies.” This gallery just shows a few sheets of scan I took. As you can tell, there were a lot of iterations. I also kept some elements separate (ie the fancy T) to be comped in the computer later to insure the strokes were clean.

First Digital Comp

The brunt of the comping happened here. Tah-dah! I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle background and other visual details yet, but the brunt of the design was roughly figured out.

Awkward Middle Phase

Oh god, I’m not fond of these at all. For one I was going for light shining through stained glass onto the poster and didn’t know how to pull it off at all so it just looks like some weird murky sunbeams. The other I leaned into the antique aesthetic for some reason which didn’t really make sense looking back on it.

I show you these, because sometimes it’s important to remember your missteps and why they were taken, so let’s take a look at that:

Stained Glass Concept: Interesting concept. Works with the wedding and gothic aesthetic. Execution was rough. I do remember being in a bit of a time crunch and didn’t know how to fake the look. To be honest, I can’t say I could pull it off now without a lot of research and practice. In retrospect, what I should have done was print out the poster and take it to a church with stained glass on a sunny day and photograph it.

Lesson learned: Work smarter not harder.

Antique Parchment Concept: I focused to much on the aesthetic of the black letter without considering why I chose black letter in the first place and how it tied to the overall concept.

Lesson Learned: Remember your overall message.

Type Adjustments

In the wake of my misguided aesthetic changes, I went back to change up the main type a bit. I got some feed back on how the type being center align was boring, so I played around with type placement for the smaller words and also tightened the crop so things ran off the page a bit so it didn’t feel so boxed in.

Final

Okay so there were a few more variations before I arrived at the last one, but most of the adjustments at that point were just info placement and some minor color options and to keep this page from getting too much longer, I’ll just jump here and explain the major changes to the final design.

So for one, the background is red now. The color is prominent throughout the music video and is associated with sin and lust so it works thematically without distracting for the main star: the type. Some subtle gradients and a dark reddish gray for the type help it feel more lived-in (if that makes sense) and avoid looking flat.

Another major change was the addition of more swatches. Just swatches everywhere! Well not just everywhere. Mostly they echo major strokes, extend and connect letters here and there, help sell the crop by going off and back on the page, and play around in the negative space without overstaying their welcome.

The band name and concert date were traced over in ink and scanned in to match the texture of the rest of the type, keeping their monoweight style to help with contrast.