Grafik Olympic Poster
Poster / September '09
Illustration by Marcus James
As part of London Design Week and to celebrate the London 2012 Olympics, Grafik Magazine invited 39 design consultancies to design a poster for a specific Olympic discipline and we were given Dressage.
Knowing little about the sport of Dressage was a blessing for this brief. Watching it for the first time is quite an overwhelming experience — a horse dancing, or is that tiptoeing, or is that gliding around an arena - is both jaw droppingly strange yet hypnotically beautiful. On one level we found it slightly disturbing that a magnificent primal animal can be trained to ‘perform’ in this way, yet the level of expertise and control the rider and horse share is astounding. Our response to the brief was to capture the two pole opposites of a horse within one image and describe the journey of submission and domination from savage beast to finely tuned athlete. We commissioned artist Marcus James to hand draw a wild horse by hand in charcoal at near lifesize proportions to capture its aggression and power. We then photographed, reduced, multiplied, coloured and cropped the drawing into the classic silhouette of a Dressage horse.
The posters are for sale with all proceeds going to charity: www.grafikmagazine.co.uk/olympik