Artist Research - 3

Laz Marques

T-Shirt/Book Cover Design

During the T-shirt design project earlier in the year, we were asked to research from a list of artists, from which I picked out Laz Marques.

Laz is an American designer, who is best known for his re-imaginings of movie posters, both old and new. He studied at various art institutes in America, such as the School of Visual Arts (New York) and the Art Institute of Philadelphia, where he majored in Fine Arts and Graphic Design. At present, Laz spends most of his working time creating advertisements for companies like Verizon, amongst others. When he is not working in advertisement, he is pursuing work in the entertainment industry, where he recreates movie posters.

Laz's work is usually recognisable from it's silhouette incorporated designs, though he is shown to have worked with basic shapes to create work.

This style of work was ideal for the t-shirt project, as these easy to create shapes can transfer from one media to another very well and keeps the visual appeal, even in different formats. This meant that Laz's work was easy to apply to both t-shirt design, and later, book cover design.

As books are often precursor to films and t-shirts follow on from films as a way for fans to present what they like, this means that the art created for them has to be representative of what happens within the story, whether the art depicts characters, scenes or events from the story. Work created by Laz fits this very well.

His style allows for the use of character and object silhouettes from the films he does work for, which accurately or symbolically represents the content of the film. This means it can be applied to book covers as well.

The simplicity of the images also allows for several ways to create them, including digital or manual processes. I feel that a manual process like print making/screen printing would be perfect for these types of images, though it would be just as viable to make similar images using digital software like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

Laz's work will continue to inspire my work, especially in my current project of book cover design.