Official poster for Lucca Comics & Games 2018.
It’s a generative poster based on a dataset made of 200+ unique graphic assets and several sets of colour displacement schemes. Printed with a digital pipeline, every printed item was a one of a kind artifact.
Lucca Comics & Games is renowned for it’s impressively massive community, is probabily the most attended comics festival in europe (second only to Comicket worldwide).
Initially I was trying to convey the idea on a community by drawing many people in one image, but it was never enough: people in Lucca are so diverse and colorful!
I then opted for a more complex approach, and went for the digital generative route: I would have represented the moltitude of colours and styles each attendendant has with a different poster for each person.
Trying to represent the community with an endless series of photographs ideally stolen from the streets where the festival takes place, exhalting the clash between ancient and modern, between classic and ephemeral,
I started designing the poster drafting some possible layouts.
Then I developed some color variants of the same layouts using an early generative colour system built in collaboration with KM Zero, to see how it looked, roughly, with a changing palette.
Once we decided the final layout, I drew all the pieces in a very complex multilayer document. Antonia Nappo helped me creating all the selections, they were way too much to bear alone.
My partner in crime Mauro Staci developed the final script that actually took those 200+ individual graphic assets to compose the final images. Lucca Comics & Games website featured a new poster for each session, for each user. Moreover, registered users could generate their own high resolution posters using specific keyords: colours and items were tagged with keywords so we could create posters that responded to a specific text prompt.
Studio KM Zero took care of the tag system and the parser was able to translate the moltitude of words users could input to a more limited and manageable and curated tag set.
Everything from tickets, to artbooks and catalogues were printed with a one of a kind image as well.
The very first comic book festival generative poster was born.
Credits:
Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini for Studio Km Zero: Graphic Design, colour palette generation system.
Mauro Staci: coding, generatiove image system scripting, colour palet generation system.
Antonia Nappo: selections.