Project 1: Visual Hierarchy
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Manipulating Typographical Elements
08/29/23
During today’s class, we conducted observations and engaged in a dialogue about various approaches to structuring content and establishing an informational hierarchy.
During the first portion of class, we went to the university center and observed the bulletin board with a variety of different posters.
We were given prompts, and discussed some interesting points based off of the variety of examples available:
- Faces can be found on posters as they evoke a feeling of human connection, which make them somewhat compelling and eye catching.
- The creator of many of these posters often fail to realize that rather than giving any of these posters a proper look; almost all passerby are quickly moving through the space and will rarely stop unless the poser is able to catch their eye from a sizable distance away.
- My prompt was contrast, and I chose the health/Galen poster to talk about. Not only does it contain high contrast of black and white, different line weights used, and difference between a clustered middle and negative space surrounding, but it also contrasts with the surrounding prints. The high black and white contrast, and rather rudimentary design is very different from the highly stylized, darkly saturated and more full bodied posters that are surrounding it.
Overall, what I found the most valuable from the conversation we had was the importance in recognizing the presence of the initiator and the reader as separate from the personal preferences of the designer. I’m glad that we are moving into a space where this distinction is becoming clearer. As much as I love my own personal aesthetic, I think that the ability to support others achieve their vision and to work on a variety of issues is something that drew me to design rather than fine art.
We were then given our content for the next portion of this project, an event poster.
Based on some internet clicking, I believe the initiator for this work would be the organizers of the City Theatre productions, perhaps a marketing team that is looking to draw people in to watch the productions. I would describe the city theatre organization as lively, community-based and artistic. The readers would be people in Pittsburgh or nearby that are interested in theatre, or at least would be open to attending a production. The artifact itself are different plays that take course over this year’s City Theatre season. Each performance is held at the city theatre, and readers who are interested would care about necessary information about each play such as the date, director, and playwright.
08/30/23
Today I focused on the six different exercises that we were tasked with to get to know the poster content better.
Just from the first look, I’m already grouping the information together. I can see that the title and overall description, as well as contact info are quite important. Each play has information such as the showing date range, and the people involved, so that information would be grouped together to make the relationship clear.
Within each play info group, I believe that the title of the play, and perhaps the date — as this is intended to be read by possible attendees, are the most important. Thus, I tried to emphasize this hierarchy through the line weight, spacing, and indentation exercises.
I played around with the idea of emphasizing certain information over another by making the line weight bigger or having it more flush left when indented:
I believe that different readers might prioritize different information about each show, so it was hard to decide on a single type of information to deem as the most important. Some readers might think the dates were the most important, while others could be interested in a specific type of play or director. Thus, I experimented by highlighting these lines of information and reordering the hierarchy through the compositions.
In this one both the date and title are emphasized, one through indentation and the other through stroke size
- For line weight, I thought that a larger stroke size would convey that information was more important.
- For line spacing, I thought that grouping lines together would indicate that this information is connected or has a stronger relationship than lines across a space. Additionally, a line with ample space has its own emphasis.
- For indentation, I thought that the further left a line was, it was more dominant. It also conveyed a sense of parent/child with the lines of content.
Scale and Color
09/01/23
During class yesterday, we talked about grids and reviewed what we worked on previously. One of the biggest takeaways that I had was to consider how the work looks from a distance, as I was using a lot of lineweights that were pretty close in stroke size and from a distance it wasn’t discernible.
I was really excited to play around with scale, and ripping the paper apart was very therapeutic. I explored using the fibonacci grid first:
I think one of the challenges I faced was that while using different types of font weights and point sizes helped distinguish bits of information and establish a sort of hierarchy, it’s hard to effectively fit onto a sheet of paper while preserving a sense of balance and comfortable negative space.
I also played around with radial grids:
However, I think the direction these compositions were going stressed me out a little bit. While I think that it would be a worthwhile direction to explore given the adjectives I used to describe City Theatre, for the time being since it’s my first time working with grids I think I might try to come back to this later.
Moving into the digital exploration, I used grids with varying increments of five, as the main aspect of the poster was that I had to convey information about five different plays.
For my first exploration, I wanted to keep it simple and just practice aligning elements into a grid. I aligned the dates to the right with the rest of the information to the left to differentiate them but keep them looking connected, at least from a distance.
I also wanted the date to seem as a similar hierarchical level as the title of each play.
Other variations with different alignments — the main title is a bit hard to place:
For the second compositional exploration, I played around a bit more by moving around the blocks of information for each play. I think this one is kind of interesting from a distance because the alignment makes each info block look a little bit like a comet — racing comets! Maybe I’ve stared at this too much.
09/03/23
For the third composition I decided to go really out there. I’m not trying to make readers break their neck, but I really wanted to explore how much I could move things around and play within the grid. This time I emphasized the dates by making them a much larger weight and point size than the rest of the information:
I arrived at these two compositions. Ultimately, I think the first one makes readability just a bit too hard, even though it was fun to make. After getting a couple peer opinions, I decided to use the one on the left, as well as using that one for the color explorations too.
09/04/23
For color explorations, I picked out in class magazine colors that caught my eye. I was looking for colors that conveyed a sense of liveliness, artistry and community.
[insert color annotations]
After analyzing some of the colors, I swatched them and adjusted in illustrator, and compared to the print out:
Some of the colors looked brighter in comparison to others, while the yellows especially looked a lot more boring and dull. The orange, blues, reds and purples caught my eye.
While exploring the color wheel, I really enjoyed purple, as it reminded me of theater while being a pretty fun color, so I swatched out different purples and printed them out:
Ultimately, the more magenta shades felt more lively so I decided to use orange and purple when doing the color explorations.
For the first exploration, I really just was trying to make the important information colored so it would be more eyecatching. With the brighter orange at first it looked too strong, so I eventually darkened the orange:
For my second exploration, I tried adding blocks to further tie each play’s information as a group, and as a way for the viewer’s eyes to sort of bounce or travel from one block to another.
I played around with overlapping the text by using clipping masks, because black text over purple was too little contrast
For the third color exploration, I made it yellow. I feel like the yellow version looks livelier.
9/05/23
Today’s critique was very helpful in bringing me out of my own head/bubble and seeing these posters in context. Right away, I couldn’t believe I didn’t consider adding more color beyond the shapes I blocked out. I could have made a background color, or changed the color of the text so the entire poster was a specific palette. I realized I was missing something that would have been really clear if I had looked more at some other people’s work along the way. I should definitely work in studio more.
Looking at the compositions, I realized from this distance that even though my text was a lot larger than before, the stroke weight was rather thin, which was really washed out by the other, very bolded poster titles around it.
Something interesting that we talked about in class was how the eye tracks through the composition. We are drawn to the most prominent, high contrast/large/boldest part, and how the eye can travel through the poster is very important. After looking at multiple examples, I now understand that negative space affects this process much more than I initially believed. Having negative space that fits well with the other content in the poster can guide the eye vertical or horizontally, and it provides a nice break from visual noise.
Negative space can be used to draw people in, such as one poster we looked at where the content was centered towards the middle of the page, and had a larger proximity towards the edges of the paper. In this way, it draws the viewer’s eyes into the middle.
By contrast, due to Gestalt’s principle of closure, type or other forms that run off the page are “completed” in the minds eye, and make the poster seem bigger than it actually is.
We also looked at the color posters, and some things that were brought up included:
- Considering the color palette for the intended audience/the nature of the event
- What am I choosing to highlight with the color choice–realizing that my color blocks were just highlighting random numbers, when it could have been used to further develop hierarchy
- Red and orange are colors that tend to attract the eye and draw people in.
9/06/23
Image
I wanted to adjust my compositions based on feedback from the past critique, but since we are now considering images as well, I decided to approach this by finding images first and then seeing where I can adjust the compositions from there. I want the images to be integrated well.
I wanted to try a variety of images, so for the 3 photos my plan was for one trying out ai generated images, one with more illustration style images, and one that was a photograph.
For the AI portion I got midjourney, which I’ve actually been really interested about trying out for a while. I had a lot of fun making a variety of images. The people looked a bit uncanny, so I decided in the end to prompt it for something more creative such as paper cutout style images.
Based on this image, I tried extending the paper cutout feel throughout the poster. For the text, I just repositioned my text blocks from an earlier composition:
However, looking at all these I just feel like they look too busy. The colors are all competing for my attention, and overall it doesn’t really give off the theatrical and hip vibe of the City Theatre.
Next, I tried doing an illustrative poster. after all the visual noise of the first 3 iterations, I wanted to cleanse my (eyeball) palate by doing something more simple and minimalistic. To convey more of a “performance” aspect, I drew expressive hand, arm, and leg silhouettes in Procreate and then image traced them into Illustrator.
I ended up playing around with type a lot for these compositions, going back to creating a very modular grid. Since my title text was already floating around, I wanted to ground the body text more.
For the last image iterations, I wanted to switch up the vibe again from the first two, and do something that was a little more suspenseful and dramatic. I looked for a while on Unsplash for an atmospheric stage photo, and eventually decided on one with stage lights. I then played around with the composition, including exploring diagonal alignments.
While I think these are pretty cool, I don’t think they embody the playfulness and community aspect of City Theatre at all.
As of now, the poster design out of exercises 1–9 that I’m most inclined towards is the one with the illustrated hands.
09/07/23
In class, we focused on quick impressions of the posters, writing down a couple sentences and the first word that comes to mind:
Revision
Based on the discussions and impressions we had in class today, the most important thing for me to consider right now is how the purple hands legs are more expressing dance performance as opposed to theatre.
I think I might try including illustrations of lips/eyes in addition to hands, and take out the legs. I’m wary of doing faces or costumes, as that might be too cliche.
Some other really helpful feedback I got from the TAs and peers was the idea of making things more contrasted to show intent. As well as advancing the hierarchy.
For example, the image below shoes how I wanted the leg to be “stepping” and interacting with the type, pushing it down. However, because the change in alignment was so incremental, some mentioned that they weren’t sure if it was intentional or not.
Additionally, looking at the entire composition as a whole, the title could be contrasted more compared to the body text. I will experiment with making it bigger.
09/09/23
I started changing the color palette, drawing inspiration from City Theatre’s own marketing and looking at the vibrant community involvement energy present.
I experimented with removing the “wormholes” the limbs were coming from, and focusing instead on integrating it with the text more.
I also made some refinements to the body text, including fine-tuned resizing so that the letters and numbers would look the same height, and removing hyphenations and fixing line breaks to be more cohesive and readable.
I then tried out a different color palette, and tried adding gradients for more complexity. However, I wasn’t too keen on the direction where this was going, something felt off. There was a slightly creepy/halloween costume vibe to the poster, instead of being vibrant and celebratory as I wanted.
After office hours, Vicky made some good points:
- Adding a tagline
- Moving away from limbs
- Trying to really blow up the size of the title
- Consistency between top detail text and bottom detail text
- Thinking about emphasis of titles versus dates
- Using turquoise to advance the hierarchy.
I did think it was definitely good to move away from the limbs concept, because I think it was really boxing me in. I decided instead to just find an image and impose it in the background.
I got some really good images from the City Theatre twitter, and I think these kind of shows the overall vibe:
Here is what the poster looks like after my final adjustments:
I had fun playing around with the different layer blending options, trying to integrate the image with the poster while keeping the text at the forefront. I decided to use the multiply option in the end, as I felt it made the colors feel more depth and nuanceful and I felt like it was the most well mixed with the rest of the things on the page.
Actually, coming back after a while, I decided to make some other adjustments such as altering the color and adjusting the sizing of the title to make it more prominent. I also adjusted the background so the image was more clear.
The final critique offered a lot of valuable insights. Firstly, I really enjoyed hearing the guests reacting to the posters, and seeing what they thought as an outsider who wasn’t there for the process. I think the points they made about considering the audience, as well as Marion’s POV as a client on what components she wanted emphasized were really interesting. It was also fun to see how different people enjoyed different versions of the posters due to their own preferences.
For me, I think while I’m not unsatisfied with my poster, I do wish that I had pushed myself further. I think seeing my work along with everyone else’s, I kind of feel like I boxed myself in to the composition I had and I could have experimented more. I also kept neglecting that the final format for viewing would effect the look, as I kept making decisions based on what I saw sitting less than a foot away with the screen zoomed in, while the final product was a poster up on the wall 20 feet away. I think for the next project, I hope to push myself more and to ask for more feedback along the way.