For my influence I chose Georg Olden. Georg Olden was the first African American to design a postage stamp and also to hold an executive position at a network. I picked him because his life was interesting to learn about. I also liked his art style. I enjoyed the bold lettering and unique ways of adding the text into the illustrations. When doing research I saw that he also did a graphic for CBS about Big 10 basketball. This made me decide to go with Little 500 because it’s a little closer to sports.

My process for this was to find as many pieces of his work and study them for a little bit. Once I did that I closed the tab and wrote things I remembered from each one almost as if I was explaining to someone else his art style. From that list I brainstormed what to use for my poster to ensure I didn’t fall into mimicry.

I had a couple different ideas of how I wanted to display my text, having the bike spokes say men and women, but it didn’t read well. Then I tried a regular tire and it’s spokes as lines for each part of the information. Lastly, I tried handlebars and this is the one I ultimately went with. The handlebars are recognizable for bikes and putting men and women into it makes it feel like an Olden design. I decided to do this horizontal because it read better and added a grain texture on top to emulate the tv grain from that time period.