ShiseIdo 30-Year Anniversary Poster


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In 1995 I was commissioned by Shiseido to create an image to celebrate 30 years of commercial films. I didn't want to create anything to overtly crass, and thus I used some data-rich techniques in an extremely subtle way. Probably too subtle, but I always look back to this experiment as perhaps my best work. The sketches for this piece took around 1 month to develop:

I then refined the image further at the actual scale (B1 728mm by 1030mm). This helped to test whether the idea would work.

The final work is composed of a square that represents the evolution of the commercial films. I wrote a little hack that brought my Mac II Ci to its knees. This technique is common today, and I could have overused it back then. But I have never wanted to overuse any concept. I'm happy about that. The lower 'growth' is a representation of the soundtrack; the swaying gold lines relate to the ascii codes of the title. Looking back it seems rather silly. But silly is good. Starting out is always good. If you click on the image below you will get the image as a PDF (10 Mb) in all of its glory.

   
 

Copyright 2005, John Maeda.