Design Hero: Poster
Project Prompt: Design an informational poster for someone who knows nothing about your design hero. You will gather, curate, and craft text, images, and typography that best tell the story of your hero and their work. How do you make a poster that both delights and resonates with your audience, while also informing and educating them?
Your poster should include:
Your hero’s name (and a subtitle, if you want)
At least one portrait of your hero
Images of your hero’s work
Informational text (a distillation of your essay)
A quotation by or about your hero
A timeline
To start the Communications Studio II semester, our class was tasked to research a “design hero” who we liked. From my initial research, I was interested in learning more about the work of Saul Bass and Wolfgang Weingart — Saul Bass had an amazing ability to create metaphors through his compositions and work, and Weingart was a revolutionary Swiss typographer that transformed the direction of Swiss-type.
For this project, I decided to move forward with Weingart. After taking a look at his Typography book, I wanted to learn from his design philosophies, as well as learn more about Swiss Design and typography. Most of his work was bold, black, and white — but if he were to use color, it almost seemed like it was not there since the color worked so well with the rest of the poster.
Moving forward, the next part of the project was to create 10 quick sketches of potential compositions for the poster and a moodboard for
I took 2 different approaches when making the sketches — I wanted a poster that portrayed Weingart’s graphic design work and another one that highlighted his work as a typographer. Taking inspiration from some of the work of Weingart’s students, I wanted to create compositions that utilized simple shapes and types to create a sense of movement and depth in the compositions.
Feedback — 2/2/23
During crit today, other students were drawn by the composition using lines that stepped down and the gridded compositions — they seemed to fit best with the metaphor of giving meaning to a grid — that the grid is meaningless until we “finesse” it to be meaningful.
An idea that I had while working on the poster was that I wanted to add analog elements to the poster. Weingart created many interesting circle compositions using letter blocks, playing with the amount of ink on the type, and creating circles of different values. It was treating type more as imagery than for readability.
After a talk with Brett, Brett encouraged me to use the textures as the “hero” of the poster. The type textures embody Weingart as a typographer and looked more visually interesting that the other poster compositions that I created as well. I was excited about this too since I wanted to work with a circular grid to mess around with the movement.
In addition, Brett also encouraged me to take a look at type specimen sheets. The idea of big text to small text, and then showing the text in action through the form of a paragraph or through highlighting some of Weingart’s work could also be an interesting composition to explore.
After refining some of my sketches digitally, I had 3 ideas that I could move forward with. The first two posters explore Weingart’s work as a graphic designer, and the last poster explores Weingart as a typographer. In these posters, I liked the idea of playing around with the grid and using it in unconventional ways. I liked the metaphor of how the grid is meaningless until one “finesses” with it to give it meaning.
Feedback — 2/9/23
- Concept is there, now I have to focus on the execution.
- Look at how to create typography digitally at a higher resolution.
- How to bring name and text into poster in a more fluid way
- Better system or type and textures.
Although attempting to create my textures was fun, I was able to find scans in Weingart’s book, Typography. In the book, there were much better-quality scans of his exploratory work done with better tools and ink.
To introduce Weingart’s name into the poster in a more fluid way, I wanted to print out his name using ink and place it into the poster so that it worked with the rest of the ink textures.
Compositionally, I thought that the use of circles could be more visually interesting. After looking for some inspiration, I saw Hoffman’s Beethoven poster.
I thought that how he was able to utilize the different widths of the circles and crop them to effectively work with the visual flow of the page. The text has a nice rag to it, allowing for it to have “breathing room.”
Hence, I tried to vary the widths, contrast, and crops of the individual circles to see if I could achieve more depth and a more visually interesting poster.
Feedback from Brett and Class Critique
- Make sure the space between the image and text is consistent
- Try changing the color of the text
- Crop the image to only the face of Weingart
- Think more about the typesetting of the essay and how it would work with the name.
- Serif Vs. Sans serif type system
Of the feedback I got, I agreed with how the body text of the poster did not seem to work well with the fluidity of the rest of the poster. Rather than chopping it up by the line, I wanted to have it wrapped in the shape of a circle. In addition, rather than continuing with the times font, I worked with Garamond, since the type Garamond was based on calligraphic typography.
In addition, I did not think that it was necessary to scan the images from the book at 1200 DPI since I thought that it was overkill, but because the images in the book were at most 6 inches wide, bringing it to a 19-inch by 30-inch poster required the best quality possible.
After rescanning everything and piecing the poster together, the poster looked much cleaner. Before due to image resolution, the text and the textures did not seem to fit since the text was very clear, and the images were blurry and pixelated.
Project Reflection
Overall, I thought that this project was a good introduction to getting to know our designers, especially if we are going to be “spending a semester” with them. The poster allowed me to better understand Weingart’s style, and how to better utilize type as an image. I also learned a lot about working in analog and bringing physical assets into the poster — it is very difficult to make sure everything is scanned at a high resolution. However, nothing can beat the organic shapes, textures, and “happy accidents” that occur as a result of working physically.
