Tiny Type Posters

Mike Rankin

This article appeared in Issue 116 of InDesign Magazine.

Amazing things happen when you cram an entire book onto a single page.

The deeper we get into this age of digital marvels, the more I notice a certain nostalgia bordering on reverence for the classics. Something inside us longs for the days when an apple was just something you ate, the Amazon was a river, and googol was a really big number known only to math nerds (10¹⁰⁰). Or maybe I’m getting old. But it’s not just me. Vinyl records sell at premium prices. Hollywood is obsessed with remakes and reboots. And independent bookstores are thriving again with shelves stuffed with titles right off the Lit 101 syllabus.

If you happen to browse through such a bookstore, you’ll also see countless items seeking to borrow a little cultural cache from the classics. An Alice in Wonderland “Drink Me” coffee mug. “2B or not 2B” pencils in the Shakespeare section. If you look hard enough, you can probably find Holden Caulfield’s red hat and Gatsby’s cocktail shaker.

But you know what would be even cooler? How about something made from the actual text of a classic book? Something like a poster that you can hang on your wall or give as a gift. That’s what we’re going to create in this tutorial.

. . . .

This article is for members only. To continue reading, please sign in, or sign up for a membership today. Thanks for supporting CreativePro!