I don’t know how you can watch Brother Mouzone and not want to make a READ poster. I know I’m not the first one to do it. But since I’m all about the GIFs, I had to animate it. I was going to use a different shot, but I thought that one was too obvious. Then I remembered that little hand-off with his helper Lamar, gun for books, and decided to work with that.

Vignelli mentioned the Golden Rectangle in his Canon. There’s something about the height/width ratio that’s naturally harmonious. So from the Wikipedia page about it, I found an image of a Fibonacci spiral for the proportions.

I felt like putting a border around the poster, so I did an image search for poster borders and found the Gwenzula Wanted Poster Supessoups Deviantart HD Wallpapers and downloaded it.

I put everything together in Photoshop. I rotated the spiral and the border 90 degrees and adjusted the pixel dimensions of both so they had the same height. I pasted the spiral on the border, and then scaled the border layer so it was the same width as the spiral. That gave me my Golden Rectangle. I changed the layer blending so you can sort of see some of the spiral. Then I put in my type. I used Garamond, a classic old style typeface known for its readability, and used the eyedropper tool to choose the type colors from the border. That gives a bit of color harmony to it.

The next trick was to get the GIF in there. I knew I wanted to paste the poster as the top layer of the GIF, but I had to get the pixel dimensions right first. I copied one of the frames from the GIF and pasted it on the poster, and it was way too small. The GIF was 640×480, so I made the width of the poster 700 pixels and pasted again, and that seemed okay. I went to the GIF and used the Image->Canvas Size function to make the size match the dimensions of the poster, then I pasted the poster as the top layer in the GIF. This covered up the GIF, so I changed the layer blending mode to Darken. Because the white of the poster background is lighter than the scene, the scene shows through. I tried to tweak it a little to bring the scene down just a little bit, but I couldn’t get that to work across all the frames of the animation, so I left it centered.

Was it worth it? I don’t know. It’s all in the game though.