A friend gave me an excellent book, A2Z and More Signs (ed. Julian Rothenstein) that inspired me to create some Christmas cards loosely based on Modernist designs. I chose a 1940s-style font, Showcard Gothic, for the main lettering and French Script MT for the contrasting text. I applied one of the prominent features of this period by setting the text at an angle and reversing portions of the text into blocks of colour. I used InDesign for the first designs, which worked OK, but later switched to Illustrator mainly because it’s easier to rotate the text in Illustrator. I did another very similar design using the text Season’s Greetings, but made the left circle red instead of green. These two were inspired by Russian propaganda posters.
The third Modernist design, Xmas Joy, with pastel colour blocks filling the negative spaces around the letters, was inspired by an undated French book (magazine?) cover “Lettres” :Arts et Metiers Graphiques. The block text is Arial Black (stretched), the contrast font is Cancellaresca Script.
You can see (and buy, if you’re interested) the three Modernist designs along with the full set of holiday cards on Ye Olde Holiday Card Shoppe on Cafe Press. They’re also available (in higher quality, along with other prints of my work) at Imagekind.
