INCEPTION
Inception Poster Design Process
Context
Inception is an academic graphic design project focused on the fundamentals of visual communication, built around a poster collection inspired by Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010). The brief was to translate the film's surreal, layered atmosphere of dreams and reality into a purely graphic language.
Strategy
The concept was grounded in research on Surrealism and the psychoanalytic theories behind the film's dream levels, translated into a moodboard of melting clocks, spinning tops, and impossible architecture, and distilled into a three-color palette (deep navy, warm red, and soft grey-blue) representing the different layers of reality.
Implementation
The visual language was built through analog exploration: ink blots and poured-ink textures were created by hand to represent collapse, duality, and the fracture between dream and reality, then mirrored, refined through sketches, and composited into three poster versions — one per state of consciousness.
Outcome
The final result is a triptych of alternate movie posters — in blue, black, and red — unified by a dripping ink-blot motif and a fractured skyline silhouette, demonstrating strong skills in concept development, analog-to-digital texture work, and poster composition.
Project Overview
As the Graphic Designer for this academic project, I led the entire process, including conceptual research, moodboarding, color and typographic direction, analog ink-texture exploration, sketching, and the final composition of the three-poster collection.
