I’m a big fan of the annual AIGA Atlanta Poster Show. Sadly, I’ve only had the time to design an entry once before. That first time was back in 2017, when the theme was movies. This year, I found myself with a little time off. When I heard the theme for their Poster Show 7: Game Night, I found myself with the perfect excuse to revisit the video game Portal.
After all, who doesn’t love games? Better yet, who doesn’t love cheeky science-fiction puzzles with a homicidal AI playing workplace supervisor?
Initially, I had zeroed in on poster-izing one of my other favorite video games. A playing card concept for the Mass Effect series, however, wasn’t quite coming together. The process for designing a poster based on Valve’s Portal games was, mercifully, much smoother.
The Olympics Meet GLaDOS
When playing the first video game Portal, I always felt a little bit like a competitive gymnast, training for some perverse Olympics. What if the evil AI at the center of the game, GLaDOS, was basically a vastly more clever (and vastly more brutal) version of Béla and Márta Károlyi.
The different eras of Olympics posters have always fascinated me. In the first half of the 20th century, they were dominated by illustrations of idealized human forms. This extended well into the 1960s, but by the Mexico City games in 1968, things changed.
Suddenly, painterly images were out. Modernism was in, and the marketing posters began to reflect the larger design identity for each games. Geometric shapes and iconography, combined with bold color schemes, prevailed. Sadly, this era, which started out so promisingly in Mexico, eventually curdled into abstract absurdism. But let that be a discussion for another day.
It wasn’t that idealized bodies doing extreme movements completely fell out of favor. It’s just that they became secondary. Interestingly, it was the big corporations who increasingly took prominence in the underwriting and experience of the Olympics, who most often played up the cliche of the athlete in motion.
Portal as Idealized Futurism
With my inspiration firmly in place, I turned my attention to capturing the core aspect of the Portal games without aping any of their aesthetics. The writing in Portal (and its sequel) is witty and darkly comic. It’s visuals are totally in keeping with cliches of futuristic technology and robotics.
I didn’t want to do a poster that looked like it came from the 1920s. Neither did I want to do a poster that looked like it had come straight from the Art of Portal 2 book.
So I reached back to the 1990s. Back then, if you wanted to show virtual characters, you used a wireframe 3D figure. All of our natural curves were deconstructed into so many (but not quite enough) polygons.
To show the actual portals from the game, I hewed to the same level of geometric abstraction as the person. Rippling curves hit just the right spot. A little more iconography and typographic play finished off the design.
Of course, I couldn’t entirely lose the dark personality of GLaDOS. I paid homage to the workplace warning signs from the game with a little bit of comedic writing in the edges.
The Finished Poster
What I ended up with wasn’t quite a poster for the game. Instead, it reads like the marketing campaign the fictional Aperture Science might use if it actually tried to bring the portal gun to market. I suppose a worldwide apocalypse might make that challenging, but let’s give it a try.
Note: For those who don’t know, the Károlyis were incredibly famous and successful gymnastic coaches who essentially ran USA Gymnastics in the 1980s and 90s. Their legacy has taken a darker turn after accusations of physical abuse emerged. They were also criticized for turning a blind eye to sexual abuse of young gymnasts. So… not actually who you want training up your kids on the balance beam, it turns out.