_message #2 advertisement for fictional brand jan s/s '18

A traditional 2 page spread advertisement for fictional brand brand for tailored pieces for men. The idea was minimalist 80s style spread and the advertising of Amsterdam menswear shop Pauw Mannen. The colour scheme is derived from red cover art of The Hunt for the Red October (1990) film, game and promotional materials. The open source equivalent for Photoshop, GIMP was used for this little exercise. The UI is a little less fancy than that of PS, but the thing is that GIMP is free to use. In addition you can just google-search any issue or alteration you want to execute - add '+gimp' and there are tutorials for days. Obviously you can also use PS tutorials and use the equivalent tools and functionalities in GIMP.

I love older menswear, especially styles from the 1930s and 1980s and so I picked a picture of male model Gary Meier showing off a roomy glencheck jacket. For a publication called Max Magazine (Paris). The picture was taken by Michelle Nafinger. The looser cut is already making a return in menswear now that the slim, shrunken and cropped fit that characterized the Slimane era is closing down. The trend will probably be towards looser fitting garments, with wider shoulder lines, more volume, and a lowered lapel notch on a wider lapel. Sleeves will get looser and you will likely see the disappearance of so-called 'kissing' sleeve buttons and the return of three non touching sleeve buttons. The sleeves of jackets themselves will become looser as well, and longer covering more of the shirt cuff.

Using the cartoonify option to get rid of detail. After that adjusting the hue/lightness/saturation and jacking up the primary colour red to the max. Lastly, I got rid of the background and made that plain black, simply with a brush. Note that in the spread a darker red is used than the primary red seen in the cover of the instructional booklet to a The Hunt for the Red October themed game.

The basis of the logo kicked off with the choice of the bicycle riding athlete from the Olimpic Icons 1 set by Ding Bang on dafont.com. The font that makes up the main logo is in Blue Printed by Jake Luedecke on dafont.com. The grid font matches the bike rider in style, and the rider is placed like super script at the end of the three letters spelling 'JAN' to balance out the the curve of the j.

The letters used for the text underneath the logo indicating directly what the viewer is looking at specifically is done in the Constantine by Dukom Design and found on dafont.com.

The two lines forming the frame hint at the classic style of high-end menswear ad I wanted to reference and allude to. A fabulous series of examples of that framing can be found here. 

I might try to make a few variations on this theme. Some other colours perhaps.

Further goals for future versions is obviously my own pictures (or drawings) and self developed font and logos used in the composition. But for now we'll just resort to ready-made elements that are free for non-commercial use.  

/// mmmm