A4: Poster Series

The final deliverable for this project was a set of 3 posters which advertised a festival of some kind. The requirements were to use a color palette, 2–3 colors, and include general poster information such as the time, date, tickets, etc. The posters were supposed to be able to stand alone, but also work together if they were placed next to each other.

The genre of the festival could be anything, so I chose to create a food festival called “Evolution of Meat”.

Final

The tone of the festival was intended to be sophisticated without seeming pretentious. I used Bodoni and Futura as my two fonts to try to bring elements of seriousness and simplicity. The first illustration is a French trimmed rack of lamb, the second is fried chicken in caviar, and the third is “clean meat”.

Sketches

Breadth of exploration

Sketching was a key part of my process in testing different concepts and layouts. My biggest challenge was how to bring enough equal variation between the three posters. Often two posters would unintentionally look far more similar to each other than the third, begging the question, “why is that one different?”.

Depth of Exploration

Each of my illustrations had a “hidden” element related to meat or cooking. In the first poster, “Classics”, I changed one of the ribs into a knife handle. For the poster “Fusion”, I used the shape of the chicken and the bounding box to create the silhouette of a knife. Finally, for the synthetic meat, I added two dots to the lid of the petri dish to make a pig nose.

Digital iterations

Keeping my initial illustrations low fidelity helped me avoid becoming attached to any particular composition.

Working in Illustrator, I also gained an appreciation for grids. Not just the use of them, but how working to showcase them can bring a sense of unity to a poster. For example, I intentionally increased the size of some elements in my final iteration to highlight the grid structure.

References

I was inspired by these posters, which primarily used one graphic to convey its message. While being quite simple, the designer worked in a “hidden” element which isn’t immediately noticed.

Reflection

I think my greatest accomplishments this project were my use of color and the simplicity of my illustrations. Creating depth and texture with only three colors was far more challenging that I thought it would be.

I think my greatest area of improvement was my illustrative choices. While I am somewhat satisfied with how they came out, there was some confusion over what the second two illustrations were. I can only hope that the illustrations would still be compelling enough for a person to at least visit the website to learn more.