At the Barcelona Grand Prix this year, Alpine celebrates 70 years of mechanical excellence, and as BWT Alpine Formula One Team turns wheels at the iconic Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, our in-house design team take the time to explain this weeks race poster - celebrating the 70 years of Alpine with a look back at all the incredible feats of engineering from Enstone.

How do you usually begin your creative process - do you sketch, write, or research first?

So I always start my poster ideation with pages and pages of sketches to plan the vision of what I want to do, this linked with a moodboard gathering the style, references and direction gets me started on how I want to position the piece, the cars and the camera angle

From here I take a rough mock-up into cad with placeholder cars to get the look and feel I want with the cars laid out, 5 A525s and the 70 here just to get the scene started:

From here I work on lighting, motion blur, camera setup, shutter speeds etc to try and get that in motion look and a shot that works on all the various formats and outputs of posters we have.

Did the design evolve significantly from your original idea?

Not too much here as I'd sketched and laid out the base idea I wanted here, but after feeling happy with what I thought was the ‘final’ poster I felt it was too clean, especially compared to the posters created previously.

So from this, I looked to mimic the Barcelona circuit even closer on the run to turn 1, so added the run-off, Armco, concrete barriers and grandstand:

This helped give some more depth to the scene and added to the sensation of speed, with more than just the tarmac and ground blurring, this was a good change and one encouraged by my peers in the rest of the design team, as we often shoot ideas back and forth and offer opinions on what looks better between each version, tweaks were made to the lighting, colour grade and exposure to give it a brighter more ‘sunny Spain’ feel than the previous low shadow version on the clean one. All changes for the better I feel.

What was the initial spark or idea behind this poster?

So with this being Alpines 70th year and the car being adorned with the A70 logo for the rear section this weekend I wanted to take that as the focal point of the design and bring all 5 of the Alpine Formula One Team cars together, in one shot, to celebrate the moment.

It was a challenge to rebuild the previous five years models’ textures, materials and liveries up to the standard we have built in recent years. This aligned with getting the year specific helmets in the right place and meant this was the most time spent on a poster this year from me, so hopefully the pay-off is worth it.