Verbal Acrobatics: Nas poster (So far)

Been getting along quite well with the Nas poster, for the song "It Ain't Hard to Tell" one of the most distinguishing characteristics of Nas album covers from the 90s is the use of his face, from child to adult as the central focus of the album covers, he doesn't really have an iconic visual style in terms of type and so on so I've decided to reference his classic Illmatic cover and create typography that create his face (hopefully!) Check out my DC blog for inspirations.

Development so far:

First thing I did was outline the 'dark' areas which I wouldn't draw type over to break it up and create some negative space for defining features.

Started drawing up shapes and in which colours I want the type over the shapes to be.

The hair negative space shows up when elements are placed behind it, I plan to have more type going wild in the background after I finished the head to bring the head out from the background.

Well this is creepy

Getting an idea of how type needs to stretch around

I'm trying to achieve this kind of aesthetic

The plan of all the lyrics to draw yet! Going to be a while yet, plan to have this finished by about Thursday so I can concentrate on the Verbal Acrobatics logo and the record sleeve housing to polish off 90's hip-hop and start getting the site together.

This concept is a lot more time consuming than the previous two but I reckon it will be worth the time, the only issue is for the face to still be visible and easily recognised with the little gaps showing through the letters, I tried to create as many solid blocks and defining features through negative space as I could. I'll post more updates when it's much further along the way and finished.


A lot of fun so far and coming a long much better than I thought it would, never done anything like this before so it's a pretty cool opportunity