CONCEPT + PROCESS
I was challenged by a colleague to read and create some artifacts and props from the book Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. The books is FULL of pop culture references, so it was relatively easy to establish a style and feel for what some of these things would look like. I picked a few artifacts that were important objects in the story.
The Time Magazine cover hung in the protagonist's hideout and was evidence of his idolization of tech genius, James Halliday. For the Time Magazine cover, I pulled from Time (and other) covers of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the iconic tech leaders of the real world. I pulled the quote from the Bill Gates cover, but modeled the character, Halliday, from the iconic style of Steve Jobs.
“He looks just like he did on the cover of Time Magazine in 2014, a tall, thin, healthy man in his early forties, with unkempt hair and his trademark horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He’s also wearing the same clothing he wore in the Time cover photo: faded jeans and a vintage Space Invaders T-shirt.”
Obviously, I took some liberties with the description due to limitations in resources, but the key idea is the Space Invaders T-shirt. During my research on what original Space Invaders t-shirts look like, I came across a reference to an E.T. movie scene where one of the kids is wearing a Space Invaders t-shirt. Knowing James Halliday’s character, he would most definitely be wearing the same shirt from the movie.
For the Anti-Sixer sticker, I used 80s bumper stickers as ispiration for the typeface, but other than that I used the description form the book:
“His record crate bore a DON’T PANIC sticker and an anti-Sixer logo -- a yellow number six with a red circle-and-slash over it.”
Finally, the “DON’T PANIC” sticker is a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Research + Inspiration
