About the project

Dune Typography is a poster-series project exploring how the same source material can change when typography is asked to perform different roles.

The assignment required four poster approaches based on a single film: functional, expressive, experimental and final.

Rather than treating them as four unrelated designs, I approached them as different ways of translating the atmosphere of Dune through type, hierarchy, scale, spacing and composition.

The brief

Each poster introduced a different relationship between information and expression.

The functional poster prioritised communication while still carrying the visual world of the film. The expressive poster translated dialogue into typographic behaviour. The experimental poster allowed legibility to break down into abstraction, while the final poster introduced image and colour under a strict time constraint.

Together, the four posters became a study of how typography can move between clarity, emotion, abstraction and speed.

Functional

The functional poster had to retain all of the required information while still feeling connected to Dune.

Instead of treating credits, synopsis and supporting information as separate blocks placed around the design, I tried to make that information participate in the composition itself.

The challenge was to maintain readability without allowing the poster to become purely informational.

Expressive

The expressive poster developed from the line:

“May thy knife chip and shatter.”

Rather than illustrating the scene literally, I used the typography itself as the material being cut, fractured and displaced.

The action contained within the dialogue became the visual behaviour of the type.

Experimental

For the experimental poster, legibility was allowed to break down.

Lines of dialogue, credits and fragments of synopsis were reorganised into a calligram-like composition suggesting prophecy, movement and scale.

Typography became image, rhythm and structure rather than straightforward information.

Final poster

The final poster was created as a half-hour exercise where image and colour could be introduced.

The time constraint forced faster decisions around hierarchy, cropping, contrast, scale and the relationship between title and image.

Design process

The posters began as quick thumbnail sketches before moving into Illustrator and Photoshop.

I explored how type, scale, spacing and negative space could hold the feeling of Dune without depending only on recognisable imagery from the film.

Across the four approaches, typography moved from information to expression, then abstraction and finally image-driven composition.

What I learned

Working through the same film in four distinct modes helped me understand how dramatically a poster can change through typographic decisions alone.

The strongest learning from the project was that typography is not only readable form. It can behave like sound, pressure, distance and atmosphere.