All Hands...

It's not very often one comes across companies that value the importance of their internal communication as much they do their external one. Usually when organizations even understand its importance they don't want to spend any real money on motivating, informing or educating their employees about their plans and strategies.

Not so with Kabam. This games developer, specializing in free to play online titles, has set some big goals for itself and wants everybody on board and motivated. So they came up with a little print campaign to run in the halls of the Kabam offices.

It was going to be a series of posters, inspired by wartime propaganda of the 1940'. Basically rallying the Kabam troops. There were going the have about 11 posters made in total and I was lucky enough to be asked to design one of them.
The brief was the stuff of dreams and basically came down to:
"It has to be inspired the 1940' propaganda style of posters, use the copy supplied, try to have the poster represent the different areas of expertise within the company... go do what you do."
Great!

So I got to it...
As some of you might know by now, I'm a real sucker for all design stemming from this era of history so I had to really contain myself and not get too carried away with the proposals
I did two sketches.

One was a quite literal representation of the copy, which is something quite typical of the posters in those days.
In the second one I tried add a little more dynamism, a bit more of the old 'marching towards the bright future'

Kabam like the hands better and to be honest I had to agree with them.
They weren't really feeling the '51%' in the roundel and also had some concerns about the legibility and placement of the "fighting our way back to"

So I fixed it and send in my second proposal, in which also went a bit more into the colour use I thought would be nice. I also sent along a sample of how I wanted to execute the final illustration.
I wanted the poster to have a lithography feel, make it look nice and olde. It was a style I had applied before, but was a slight (but fun) departure from what I usually do. No inking involved this time, just going form the pencils straight to vectors and then to photoshop for some trickery.

The go to finalize was given and I started on the final piece. The only thing that was bugging me about the typography was the "fighting our way to 51%" line... it was too frilly. It needed to be more robust. So I stripped it all the way down to a simple brushed display face (using House Industries' House Slant from their Sign Painter collection).

(click it to get a better view)