Illustration | Storytelling - Duration 5 Weeks
Woody’s First Haircut
A dynamic event-poster design.
Woody’s First Haircut is a dynamic poster focused on synthesizing typography and illustration within motion design. It’s a celebration of firsts for a young pencil’s first haircut, designed as a save-the-date event.
Drafting ideas for this project, I was immediately drawn to the idea of an imaginative poster for a first time event. Haircuts are a big deal for little kids, and sketching with a pencil at the time, it became a fun idea to combine the idea of firsts and pencils, to create an event for a pencil’s first haircut. The whole poster is filled with pencil jokes and a little quote from Grandma.
The Story.
Creating characters that feel authentic.
There are three main characters featured in the final poster: Timmy himself, Grandma, and the Barber. When pencils are fresh, they’re as long as they’ll ever be, so baby Woody is quite tall compared to the Barber and his Grandma. Grandma is old, so she has a compass that acts as a makeshift cane to keep her standing.
Building the poster.
To create the poster, several graphic components had to be individually created. The title “You’re invited to: Woody’s 1st haircut,” was spliced letter-by-letter, to create the erasing effect. Pencil shavings were also created in variation.
The Final Step: Designing the Motion Elements.
After creating all of the graphic elements in Adobe Illustrator, I imported them into After Effects. To emphasize the typography, I wanted to include the action of an eraser removing the title for the event. Another element of motion design was the flickering of the text on the bottom left, and the bouncing of the characters.