A is for Annihilation (Patreon)

Lettering is one of my weak points as a graphic designer, but I recently took a skillshare class that took a more experimental approach to lettering (i.e. "What if I made this part round" rather than "What is the best letterform to express X?") and it's gotten me much more interested in it. Here's a page of my experiments.

Then someone I follow on instagram, Aurelie Maron, posted a different letter every day, inspired by a favorite movie from the 80's and 90's.

This seemed like a great way to keep me interested in practicing. But, of course, I had to make the theme a little bit more me so I opted to make it all *obscure* movies that I love.

Annihilation was the first movie I thought of (though I later thought of Jan Svankmajer's Alice, which was also very tempting.)

Alex Gardner's 2018 film Annihilation is a sci-fi/horror film in which the greatest horror is change. An alien... something, lands on a beach in rural florida and creates an ever growing forcefield (termed "the Shimmer") from which nothing ever returns. The film follows a group of five women (a physicist, a biologist, a psychiatrist, a geomorphologist, and a paramedic) who have volunteered to enter The Shimmer in order to study it. Once inside they find that The Shimmer causes rapid and seemingly impossible mutations and then things get weirder from there.

In the film, The Shimmer's border is depicted as this really cool iridescence.

Of course, I wanted to see if I could create something similar. I'm pretty happy with what I managed.

There's also recurring images of cells dividing

And an alien doppelganger (which my husband calls a Shimmer Baby.)

So I wanted to echo that imagery in the Letterform, especially since an A is often, but not necessarily, symmetrical.

I decided to go with the less recognizable, more cell-inspired design.

Overall, I liked it but it wasn't quite there. For the background I added a photo of moss and more shading.

I think I finally got it. It's alien, ephemeral, organic but somehow also sci-fi.  For my next letter I need to choose between Braid and Bamboozled.

This may take a while.