Project 1: Poster
Communication Design — Studio II: Design Hero
January 31, 2024
Project Brief
Design an informational poster for someone who knows nothing about your design hero. Gather, curate, and craft text, images, and typography that best tell your hero's story and their work.
Picking a Hero
As I embarked on a new design project, I decided to challenge myself and try new things and styles. This project excites me and terrifies me at the same time. I want to challenge myself as a designer and look for a design hero I would typically not pick. This is terrifying because there are so many options to choose from, and what if I like someone that would be too much of a challenge for me?
Choosing a designer is one of the hardest things I have had to do. First, I tried finding Colombian designers. As I researched them, I realized their work resonates with me culturally, but I have never seen work like theirs, which would be very challenging to implement. The more I researched, the harder it got. I found a lot of designers that I liked, but there needed to be more information about them or their work. So, I had to switch paths.
Then, I decided to pick between the different design movements and see which one interested me the most. I chose the Bauhaus movement because it focused on purposeful minimalist designs. Moreover, the Bauhaus style was very geometric and angular, which I knew would challenge me in this project. I found designers like:
- Josef Albers
- Marcel Breuer
- Walter Gropius
I couldn’t decide between them because they were all from different fields. So, I decided to look for someone with experience in most fields. I have been interested in learning about color theories and their implementations in different fields for a few years. So, I ended up going with Josef Albers. I knew a bit about him and his story at the Bauhaus and how he and his wife were forced to leave, which made me wonder about his life and his career after.
After picking Josef Albers, I wasn’t feeling the other designers I had researched about. I was troubled because I had to bring another designer the next day. I decided to go into some design award pages like Red Dot and look for someone else. I ended up finding Stephan Bundi. His work focused more on graphic design, mainly posters. He aligned with the challenge I was looking for, something minimalist and geometric, just like the Bauhaus style. He brought a new perspective by implementing some 3D aspects to his posters. I have never worked in a 3D medium, so I knew this would be interesting. I’m bringing both of them to class.
Research
Between both designers, I decided to go with Josef Albers.
While doing the research, I found a lot of information and, thankfully, many archives from which I got most of his work. At first, one of my main concerns was finding good-quality files of his works, but after seeing those archives, I was saved. There was a lot of information about him. I discovered all his work on color theory, and it intrigued me so much that I ended up renting his Interactions book in the library.
Sketches
I decided to do my sketches on InDesign to make them more high-fidelity. It was a way to visualize the portraits I had found and combine them with his artworks. It also gave me a better idea of the space I would be working with and the scale of the contents.
Critique I
For the first critique, I met Brett individually through Zoom. He suggested I focus on the first two posters (top right corner). The first one showed an interesting connection between Josef Albers’s Portrait and his work, so he suggested I implement more colors. For the second poster, Brett said it was a good way of showing various artworks; he encouraged me to find a way to include his portrait somewhere in there.
After meeting with Brett, I decided to focus on the first poster. There are many exciting ways to add color to it. I also have a precise quote in mind that I want to use for the poster, and I can achieve an exciting metaphor with it. I am worried about changing his artwork; I am still determining how much I can change without it turning into my work instead of his.
Critique 2
This is the poster I ended up taking with me to the second critique. I was trying to preserve his artwork as much as possible. I felt weird about it because it felt like his work and barely like me. I also had difficulty adding the timeline because he worked for many years as a professor while working on his pieces. I decided to add the timeline in the lower left corner, and I tried to include it in the artwork, so I used one of the colored bars to indicate the years he worked as a professor while also highlighting some of his artworks.
Most of the comments I received during the second critique concerned making the poster more mine, more dynamic, and not so geometric. Brett said, “We can see Josef in it, but we can’t see you.” He also told me to limit the colors to a single color palette.
Final Poster
After the second critique, I had more liberty to include more of myself in the poster. I played around with the color strips and decided to add his artwork to the poster instead of just referring to them through colors. One of the main issues I had while refining the poster was the image's resolution. I tried different things to improve it, and I even asked for help from some of my professors. In the end, this was the final result.
In the end, I learned different ways to improve the resolution of an image or at least “fake it.” I also learned how to explore more with colors and when to limit them; too much color can sometimes be distracting and overwhelming. What I found most challenging was trying to make the poster more dynamic without breaking the geometry, which was very characteristic of his work.