Lynda | Type Projects: Poster Designs with Nigel French

This is actually a collection of four separate tutorials in Nigel French's Type Projects Series. Each one focuses on a different art style or movement: Art Nouveau, Constructivist, Dada, and Grunge.

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"For every time its art. For art its freedom." For turn-of-the-century Europe, its art was Art Nouveau, a style hallmarked by curved lines and natural forms like flowers and plants.

After a period of respite, Art Nouveau reemerged in a big way in the 1960s and has remained in the designer's repertoire ever since. In this Type Project course, Nigel French shows you how to recreate a type treatment in the Art Nouveau style, using Illustrator, Photoshop, historically appropriate typefaces and colors, and ornamental elements that entwine with the letterforms themselves.



Constructivists believed art should play a role in a better future for us all—that even typography could inspire action, reaction, and social progress.
The Constructivist style was resurrected in the 1980s and is still popular, striking, and fairly easy to imitate today. In this Type Project, Nigel invokes the style and the spirit of the Constructivist movement in an evocative poster design. He shows how to choose historically appropriate typefaces (square, solid, and sans serif) and use Illustrator’s tools to align, space, and rotate your type. Plus, learn how to use a simple illustration to enhance the underlying message and add texture to your design.



The Dada art movement rejected logic and reason, and instead embraced nonsense, irrationality, and disharmony. While the movement did not stand the test of time, Dada's legacy lives on in literature, visual arts, and graphic design. In this installment of Type Project, Nigel French shows you how to resurrect this "anti-art" style and build a Dada-esque typography treatment. As with the other courses in the series, he shows you how to choose fonts and color palettes appropriate to the time period and how to use Photoshop and Illustrator to recreate the style for a modern age. These techniques include simulating imperfect baselines, creating an overprint effect, and adding texture.



Welcome to this installment of Type Project, where Nigel French shows you how to choose historically appropriate typefaces and apply design treatment to fit a particular style.

Here he uses Illustrator and Photoshop to create a type treatment inspired by Grunge—the style most commonly associated with the music scene that originated in Seattle in the 1980s and 90s, and continues to resonate today. Learn how to create a background "wall" of type using Illustrator symbols, delete the counter spaces, and distress the design with dirty type.