If it weren’t for talented illustrators and graphics designers, sci-fi inspired gems such as this Death Star II blueprint poster would be even farther from reality.
The crowdfunded Death Star II blueprint poster is the creation of Carlos Pardo, a graphic designer and illustrator based in Paris, France. Better known as Made, Pardo has been active in the video game industry, having worked in the past 15 years for such great names as Blizzard, Microsoft, Docomo NTT, Orange, Mattel, Ubi Soft, Mindscape, Havas, Ankama, and others. As a child, he was lucky enough to watch the original Star Wars trilogy on the silver screen, unbeknownst to him that this space saga would later influence both his creative universe and professional life.
Here is how Made described his project:
“My everyday work is about imagining and building new graphic codes, extending usability and improving the overall experience. Two of my many passions are typography and iconography, I’ve been building my own fonts and icon sets for years, using some for clients, and continuing to work on those tools on my own time.
Two years ago I released a design side project that was the cartography of the roads network of France with a subway map stylization, it was the first part of an ongoing serie. It was a long, complex and a very instructive challenge that fueled my taste for maps. During the process of documentation for that project, I stumbled across a lot of interesting schemes, conventions, blueprints, and started wondering about maps of iconic places or objects that influenced and defined me, as a creative. At one point I was looking back for Star Wars, specially the Death Star that always impressed me by it’s monolithic complexity… and I found almost nothing that could go on my workshop walls, only small 3D schemes and a few screen captures…
The idea grew and as soon as I completed my France roads cartography, I started documenting and designing my own interpretation of the Death Star, model II.
2 years of determination and more than 400 work hours later, the lost blueprint is almost complete.”
The Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign has been a major success, as backers pledged almost 14 times the €4,000 ($4,400) funding goal, with 19 more days to go, as of the time of writing. The rewards range from being credited on the wall of supporters for €1 ($1.10), to 10 digital wallpapers for €5 ($5.50), 9 postcards for €20 ($22), or the Death Star II blueprint poster itself. Thirty early birds had the change to get one poster for €30 ($33), while regular backers could get a pack of 5 posters in A1 format for €170 ($187). Glow in the dark and A0 editions where also available, but those are gone, too. Had there been a corporation involved in this project, there probably would have been thousands upon thousands of posters, but Made likes to provide his creations as limited editions. After all, the artist has to sign all of the blueprints.
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