About Me
Hi! I’m Abby Chen, a sophomore majoring in Information Systems with an intended HCI minor. I took this course because I want to learn more about how to create effective designs that properly convey to the audience my intended message. I hope that the skills I learn will aid me in my career in the future. A fun fact about me is that I’m on CMU’s volleyball team!
For this project, I chose to use posters in Tepper for both my examples.
Ineffective Example:
There are many reasons why I found the design of this poster to be ineffective. At first sight, the text is overly cramped together, making it very hard to absorb the important information. For example, with a poster like this, the essential information to convey is the short description/title, location, time, and date. However, the author decided to not differentiate the time and date from other information; it’s spaced equally with everything else and is the same font size. I think that if the author had correctly utilized spacing between pieces of information to add emphasis, then the sizing wouldn’t have as much of an impact. But, because everything is relatively the same, it’s hard for a reader to find the information they need, especially at first glance.
Aside from the spacing and sizing, I believe the font choices of the poster weren’t the best. There was no added/decreased weight on font and I think the fonts itself are slightly outdated (especially the title one).
Another improvement is to use negative space better. All the information and headers span across the whole poster; if they were spaced differently, like “The Consortium presents…” formatted only on the left half, then the emphasis and design would be clearer and more organized.
Effective Example:
When I first looked at the poster board, this was the first poster that caught my attention. Although I usually am not a fan of yellow, I think that in this situation it was a strategic choice. The poster board was covered in posters, and most had a color scheme of black or white, so the use of yellow made this one stand out. Along with the overall color choice, I liked how the blocks were colored subtly different shades of yellow. By doing so, the readers can see that the information is disconnected, but not so much that there’s a significant contrast.
Another aspect I liked a lot about this poster is the use of font sizing and the consistency. Similar pieces of information, like the performances are formatted the same, so it’s clear what they are. The size of the names compared to everything else demonstrates that that’s the most important part of the poster, so I think the information hierarchy was very clear and executed well. The grouping of the various pieces is effective in my opinion and very easy to digest.
Lastly, I really enjoy the font choice coupled with the purpose of the poster. It’s simple but matches the fact that this poster is for a comedy theater. The lack of capitalization adds to the image and overall vibe of the poster and makes it seem for a more modern audience. It also is utilized effectively with emphasizing information; the only parts that are capitalized are the comedians’ names, which is also what’s sized the largest.
