While I was working at my internship at Creative & Print, I was set with the hypothetical brief to recreate the iconic LNER posters using modern day landmarks, which had not yet been built.
LNER ran between the 20s and 40s in Britain, and in that time William Barbital and then Cecil Dandridge created Art Deco style posters to advertise the company as glamorous and sophisticated, despite it's very industrial operations in coal and freight.
The Original LNER posters
My posters were to be printed at A1 size, and to replicate the style and feel of the retro posters. It was an interesting brief, as the original LNER posters varied quite a lot, as shown above – some utilised more realistic tones while others used bright and unrealistic colour palettes, creating beautiful fanciful landscapes. I knew that in my posters I wanted to try both approaches.
I first sourced images from Shutterstock, choosing to focus on iconic buildings of the late 20th and 21st century. Many of these ended up being from in and around Central London, although I wanted to make sure to include landmarks from up and down the country, where the LNER trains would have originally run.
I would then vectorise the images in Illustrator (after editing them slightly in Photoshop, increasing the contrast and vibrance in some cases), before changing the colours to match the colour palettes of the original posters. In some cases, I would try the same building with both the more muted and realistic palettes as well as the bright ones, finding it hard to decide which I preferred in some circumstances! I also went in with the smooth tool to fix any imperfections in the image and to make it smoother.
From the initial photo to the final product(s)... muted and colourful!
The Angel of the North needed a bit more editing to simplify some details...
Printing the posters
One of the most exciting aspects of this project was to get my posters printed on A1. I had never had anything printed at this scale, so it was really rewarding to see something I created at such a scale.
