Monongalia: Folk Music Festival Poster Series
Project 4 | 51–262 Communications Design Fundamentals | Spring 2020
The next project I had was Project 4: Poster Series.
You will create a series of three posters that visually introduce three different arts events held within a single arts festival. The three posters will be distinctive, yet use some common design elements to unite the collection to communicate that the events relate to each other. The same color palette of 2–3 hues plus black and/or white must be employed across all 3 posters.
Use no more than two type families for the entire series. Successful students will be able to interpret and visually represent content that has an expressive
nature for informational communication using typography, form, and color.
To begin, I thought of festival ideas and sketched a couple. I liked the idea of a board games festival or a classical music festival.
However, after sketching out a few designs, it struck me. I wanted to do a folk music festival in a park so that I could also incorporate landscape into my poster series design.
I chose to create main festival poster in the park, and two sub-event posters each featuring one of the performances. The two instruments I wanted to focus on were flute and mandolin as they are often staple instruments in contemporary folk music. Then, I chose the performance names — Appalachian and Onondaga. They are a mountain range and lake respectively.
After initial sketches and feedback, I moved onto digitizing them.
I focused on the landscapes I pictured to go with each poster. However, felt that the posters weren’t quite a series yet because Onondaga was mostly blue while the others were green.
The feedback I received from the desk crit was to incorporate the instrument into the landscape and to make a more simplified color palate. It was also suggested I create some font hierarchy, and create a better, simpler logo.
I made the label of information a tad smaller and the actual information such as location and time much bigger. I also played around with adding instruments to the image. It worked well as the ground / hill but with the flute, I tried to just incorporate the keys as a path on a hill.
I didn’t like it as much and it didn’t really show that Onondaga was a lake so I tried another set of iterations
I tried to go back to the first iteration and add the keys into the lake. However, I had the same initial problem where it felt like the blue wasn’t really part of the poster series.
I tried to fix this issue by adding more blue to the first poster, in the form of a pond, and more green in the last poster, in the form of mountains in the background. I also added some music note breeze in the first one to show that it was a music festival.
However, I still felt like the instruments were out of place and the feedback that I received is that they are not the same fidelity. In addition, the green with black outline was too harsh, so I made some edits to the logo.
I tried having the title of the festival, Monongalia, on the horizon but then it looked out of place compared to the sub-event posters.
Finally, I changed the placement of the instruments to be black and white against tri-colored background. I added darker shades of blue to the lake to give it the effect of using 3 blues. The mountains had three shades of green, and the original poster has a green to blue gradient on the notes as well as green triangles and blue round shape to pul the three posters into one series.
