The inspiration to design this poster came from watching witness testimony in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial. Floyd’s girlfriend, Courtney Ross, began crying almost immediately when she took the witness stand. She relived the first time she and George met. Ms. Ross was crying on that occasion too, and Floyd asked her, “ Well, can I pray with you?” The irony hit me in a flash, as I thought about the countless times in my youth that I kneeled to pray in church. The concept took off from there.
I wanted to use expressive typography and started experimenting with different elongated shapes slicing into Floyd’s name. Initially I tried traditional typefaces. I also wanted to give Ross’s testimony a concept-driven graphic framework, so I placed the entire block of text in one big bar of police tape. First drafts were emotionally and aesthetically lacking. I realized that I had to use hand-drawn type, as well as an actual representation of Chauvin’s leg and knee, and a zigzagging strip of police tape. Finer details were later added such as the thin yellow outline around the black letters to make them pop, the bulging folds of the pants behind Chauvin’s knee, the buckling of the letter ‘F,’ and the number of minutes and seconds that Floyd struggled to breathe.
