Happy New Year readers! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays! I wanted to kick off 2012 with a brief introduction into how I ended up writing for BTM and give you an insight into my work and the process that is behind it. I’ll keep it brief…

As well as spending my time checking out the the work of numerous poster designers on a regular basis, I also try to make time to design some posters of my own. As a full time graphic designer it can often get frustrating as day to day jobs for clients can be quite restrictive on the old creative juices. A few years ago, in an effort to combat this frustration I set myself the task of designing some work for myself, just for fun! The first mini project I began was to design an alternative, Saul Bass style poster for one of my favourite movies, Back to the Future. It was great fun, I even put it up on my own blog (www.davewilliamsdesigns.blogspot.com) to show my handful of readers and suggested that if anyone wanted a copy I would get 50 printed, but I got no response and after a few days I’d forgotten all about it.

Months later, after sharing the design with a few friends on twitter I noticed my work was gaining popularity. A well known comedian/TV presenter in the UK called Leigh Francis (also a huge BTTF fan) was sent a link to the design and kindly retweeted it. It was a simple act, but for a guy with over a million followers it was to have huge implications on my poster career! Within an hour I was sold out of all 50 copies and was inundated with requests via twitter, email and blog comments as to where people could get themselves a copy. However, I had originally stated that I would only get 50 copies printed, so I stuck to my word, these were all to be hand signed and numbered giving them a certain collect-ability and I didnt want to ruin that.

Fast forward a year and here I am, numerous posters later. It’s been a crazy 12 months! In the past year I have sold hundreds of posters, often selling out within an hour of release. Ive also been fortunate enough to have been commissioned by movie producers to design bespoke posters for their films and was even able to donate a one off piece of my work to a charity auction which raised $150 for those affected by the Japanse earthquake. It hasnt all been plain sailing though, Ive been on the receiving end of nasty letters from a large worldwide movie studio who were not happy that I had sold my own (completely original) version of a poster, based on their film (I wont mention the film, but it had Dinosaurs in and was directed by Sir Spielberg), Ive had posters go missing in the post and often didnt make any money from selling my work once Id factored in postage,packing, printing costs etc as well as the hours and hours of long work it takes to put a design together, but I wouldnt change any of it. Ive met so many brilliant people, uncovered a whole world of alternative movie posters and stumbled across the word of some awesome modern designers including Olly Moss, Eric Tan and Tyler Stout.

Designing movie inspired art has become my passion and nothing beats the feeling of finishing off a piece of work and then sharing it with the world! Over my next few posts here on Beyond the Marquee Ive decided to give you loyal readers an insight into my working process as I uncover what really goes into designing one of my alternative movie posters. First up is my latest piece of work, brand new for 2012 entitled “The Finest Features of Forrest Gump”. You can see the finished piece below and in the next part of this mini series I’ll show you how it all came together!

Thanks for reading!

To be continued…