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Fantastic Beasts Symbols

The set of symbols are designed to illustrated the twelve most shown creatures in the movie Fantastic Beasts series written by J.K. Rowling. The symbols depicting the mysterious and unique essence of the magical world are created for commercial prints and merchandise of the movie.

Duration

5 weeks, May. – Jun. 2020

TEam

Joanne Chen

ROle

Creative Direction, Ideation/Iteration, Symbol & Poster Designer

We were assigned to design icons for themes that related to our typography project, Linea, which is derived from an anonymous font of the book, Reptiles and Birds. At the same time, to include stronger design concept, we went over to explore themes related to extinct or mythical creatures.

At the end of the exploration, we decided to base our symbols on the twelve most shown Fantastic Beasts creatures, which are all identically different and important.

Style Ideation

Style 1(Left):

Linea: monoline+ geometric shapes+ squarish tips

Style 2:

Montage, color blocks, simple shapes

Style 3:

Forming a round shape

Style 4 (right):

Silhouette, white lines, pointy tips, side view

During our symbol ideation phase, we explored a wide variety of visual and conceptual ideas, considering both style and subject matter for the Fantastic Beasts.

Style 1 to 4 (Left to right)

critique insights

  • Style 1 has more personality and got more potential in design.

  • However, its flat front views lack of specialties or body features of the creatures.

  • The geometric shapes can be more consistent and uniform.

Symbol
Refinement

After the first critique, we went with Style 1 and decided to add another set of symbols which shows the side views of the creatures. To make it more cohesive with the front view set, we made a visual guide which set rules on the geometric shapes and decorative details of the symbols. Moreover, we made both sets of symbols in the dimension of 1:1, so it is visually organized and consistent.

Final Front-View Symbols

To add more complexity and uniqueness, our final front-view-symbol set features decorative backgrounds that demonstrates the characteristics and context of the creatures in the movie. The two-color-background subtly highlights the speciality without outshining the main symbol set by reducing the thickness of the line.

Poster Iteration

We first tried to fit them inside a circle without overlapping them. However, it left too much white spaces. Then, we rearranged and removed the overlaps and connected the broken lines which made it hard to distinguish the creatures. Last, we cut out more overlaps and left breathing rooms around each creatures, moreover, we highlighted the eyes with yellow for easier recognition.

Since the linear form of the side-view-symbols are very abstract and loose, we thought of integrating them into one to avoid visual disarray and lead to a halt of perceptions and discovery.

Inspirations

Process

Final
Side-View
Symbols Poster

The poster of side-view-symbols will act more as a theme poster which instead of showing individual side view symbols, it illustrates the usage and visual characteristics of them.

Decorative elements were also added to increases consistency in style to lead viewers to the next poster.

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