The Man Who Handcuffed Lightning
Class project capturing the famous taunt of champion boxer, Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay)
One of history's greatest boxers was also one of the most clever trash-talkers. This simple graphic design project was meant to capture Ali's greatest moments before his fight with equally-renowned Sonny Liston, through a movie poster.
As for the title, I decided there is nothing more befitting a title than "The Man Who Handcuffed Lightning" for a boxer who was known be fast and agile in a sport where boxers were training to be the strongest. The title was based one of Ali's many prematch rhymings taunts:
"I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick; I'm so mean I make medicine sick."
To showcase the ferocious attitude that exists in the culture boxing, I used a moment from Ali's fight with Doug Jones. I then cropped Ali out of the picture and outlined him and upped the contrast in Photoshop to enhance the intensity of the moment.
Project Information
The color scheme seemed pretty straight forward. I chose to stick with two colors aside from black and white. The bright red represents blood, something in the sport that both the winners and losers share. And the parchment color gives the entire poster a vintage look, mimicking old-time pre-match hype posters.
The design, for the most part, changed very little. In the preceding iterations, the title was at the bottom with the iconic quote at the top. This lead to some confusion for the viewers since the eye did not have a clear path to follow. To solve this, the title was moved to the top and extra defined darker blocks were added with the edges cleanly leading from the title, to the air-date, to Cassius’s head, and following his punching arm through/to the quote.