The portraits of these authors came first. I had the idea to create portraits using initials as a colorful pattern. I thought it would be cool to do this with authors in keeping with the type-based aspect of the concept. I settled on Sci-Fi authors because that is my favorite genre. I decided that best way to get the result I was after was to pick colors and color individual squares by hand to make the mosaic portrait. I then made an overlay with letters punched out to reveal the colors below. All together, this process took about 30 hours.

Once I had my portraits, I felt that they needed to be given some sort of context. The next step of the process became creating a design for a lecture poster that these could be the art for. I tooled around with the design for a while, and eventually settled on a poster that was rather minimal in order to really highlight the portraits. I decided to throw the pattern on in a larger format to call more attention to the letterforms themselves. This became the final design.