One of these is not like the others.
It is my goal to have my own copies of every Left 4 Dead poster that Valve makes, because I like Left 4 Dead, and I like the artwork in general. For that matter, I already own ten of these posters, and four of them are already framed, and hanging in my house. As for the others, there simply isn’t any aesthetic room in my house for them to go, but it goes without saying that one day, I’ll have every poster framed and hung, arranged in some sort of clever, aesthetically pleasing fashion.
But leave it to Valve to fuck up what could be beautiful to me, in more ways than one.
The original four L4D posters were a nice bargain of a deal, and I was pleased that they were all consistently sized at 18 x 24″, a reasonable size, and most importantly a common one, to which there were plenty of set frame options out there for me to be all artsy and shit, and frame them up. Naturally, when L4D2 came on the scene, I aspired to get those posters too, since I too enjoyed the sequel immensely. However, I guess it was my own fault that I didn’t read the descriptions on Valve’s website when I purchased them, because apparently, the L4D2 posters were all a new, 24 x 30.75″ size . . . except for Dark Carnival, which was the odd landscape bastard-sized 30.75″ by twenty fucking one inches. Seriously, wtf?
I really do believe that beauty is symmetry, and beauty is consistency. And Valve ruined my idea of beauty by changing up the sizes of all the posters for really no apparent reason. I have no intention of framing larger posters, and the odd-man out Dark Carnival, which is a pretty unique size in itself.
But, I’m a resourceful guy, and more importantly someone who knows how to right this wrong. So basically, I converted all of the L4D2 poster designs into the same 18 x 24″ shell as all of the L4D posters, down to appropriate margins and white borders. One of these days, I’ll be back to work at another agency or studio to where I’ll be able to clandestinely print these out at their new, appropriate size, and the high-resolution PDF is ready for its task.
The most improvisation, was obviously Dark Carnival’s poster. Since it was a bastardized size in the first place, it actually required some real elbow grease and leg work on my part, but I am a perfectionist, and I do like a challenge:
I obviously had to sacrifice a good deal of space on the lower portion to black space, in order to compensate for the lack of image vertically. But the title treatment, and tag line are size appropriate to the other four posters, and in the general quadrant as the others have them. Obviously the arrangement of the characters is clearly altered, but pulling Rochelle and Ellis from the left and right sides and into the center, while shifting the background up wasn’t at all that difficult. I kept the stuffed animals in, because one, they were covering the feet of both characters, and I felt they added a good breaking out of all the black space. I even went as far to re-typeset all of the credits (if you’re curious, the font is “SteelTongs”). Once framed, one of the most notable differences is that instead of the white border that the other four L4D2 posters will have, this one will be black all around it; I could very well have adjusted it to retain white space all around like the others, but in this particular instance, the black works. I can easily position this one as the middle poster between the other four, anyway.
So there we have it. Refusal to accept what was given to me and break up my vision, and the steps I took, and the means necessary to fulfill my goal of symmetry. Eat it Valve, my L4D2 posters are better than yours.
