Motorcycle Anatomy
+ Three Main types
Poster Project by Kali Knudson
Poster Project by Kali Knudson
This poster was inspired by a book my dad owns, called "Classic Motorcycles". It's a book on everything in the motorcycle world - the culture, riders, evolution, different types, anatomy, brands, and catalogs of motorcycles. I chose to focus on presenting the anatomy and three of some of the main types of motorcycles.
Next, I developed three different moodboards to reflect styles I could use to present this information. I ended up choosing to go with a mix of both the first and second boards, with the simplicity in color scheme in the first one and the wavy lettering in the second.
This step involved sketching rough mockups of what I thought the project might look like. My three ideas were a stop motion film illustrating motorcycle anatomy, toy boxes that illustrated a few different types of motorcycles, and an interactive poster that illustrated both. I chose to go with the poster, sketch shown on the right, and to make an interactive physical version as my final project.
This was the stage when I decided that my poster would be interactive in the anatomy section by creating magnetic pieces that viewers would be able to move around to help understand how they fit together. I designed the top motorcycle, and the other four were created using "Image Trace" in Illustrator to create a tricolor effect and make them look like illustrations.
This was where the largest shift in design happened. For this iteration, I knew I wanted to change the color palette to be more clean and simple. I decided to narrow the featured types of motorcycles down to three and to illustrate them all myself to have a more cohesive design. I also wanted to have a late 60s/early 70s vibe with the styling on the anatomy pieces, the racing stripes on the left, and the fonts, which were historically used in that era.
These are some of the different iterations in the style as the one above, leading up to the final poster project. These iterations were focused on refining the lettering and how to style the top and bottom. I finally decided to get rid of the blue lines and simplify it down to just the black lettering, and to put the lettering below the bikes in a humanistic wavy style, matching the top and framing the poster well.
Below is a digital version of the final poster. This iteration was a simple version that incorporated the humanistic wavy text edits of fonts from the late 60s/early 70s. In the physical version, the parts of the anatomy portion are magnetic so the viewer can move the pieces around and see how they line up. There is an outline on the background of the poster and lines with labels to the main parts so the user has a general guide for where the pieces go and can learn from it without the poster becoming too complex.
When/where would this be used?
I designed this to be used as a learning tool for people who aren't familiar with motorcycles. I think an interactive poster with some of the basics of the anatomy, along with a few of the main different types of motorcycles out there, definitely would have been useful for my dad to be able to easily show me some of the basics. This poster could be used in schools, motorcycle shops, and homes where someone is going to teach another person the basics of motorcycles.
How was the physical version made?
The flat poster portion is glued to a magnetic white board that has a black frame, which provides a base for the magnets to stick to, as well as a professional-looking frame for the poster. All illustrations and lettering were created on Adobe Illustrator and were professionally printed on thick cardstock. To create the anatomy portion, I initially drew the parts, then had wood pieces laser cut to create bases for the parts, glued them together, epoxied magnets to the backs of the wood pieces, and arranged them in layers to fit together properly.
