Effective vs ineffective design
Hi !! I’m Janice Wan, a second year business major also pursuing a minor in HCI. I’m from Pasadena, CA but I was born in NYC. On campus I’m involved in ASA and DS, and back home I assist celebrity stylists around LA. I like fashion design and eating avocados with a spoon. And lastly I think you’ll get to know this soon enough but just to prepare you, I’m always loud , always laughing, and a l w a y s overdressed.
This first example is the effective design example. It’s an event flyer/ cover photo for the official labor day party hosted by ASA. It was designed by a friend and fellow board member who’s currently a second year design major. It’s intended for all CMU students and the goal is to increase interest and participation in this event. I think this is an effective design because the shapes and colors are very clean, the colors are cohesive and it communicates the necessary information simply. The blue seemingly random shapes/outlines take influence from the letters they shadow. The only text that needs reading is the basic info for the event, stating what it is and providing the date, time, and location. These elements work together because the contrasting colors make the text pop. The background is cohesive and aesthetically makes sense with the yellow graphic — it’s soft and easy on the eyes while it ties in all the letters and shapes and text to make it one clear poster rather than fragmented elements.
The second one is the ineffective design example. It’s an event flyer for a gathering of cat owners and their cats hosted by cats, according to the caption on the bottom. The goal is to get people to go to the event and I personally don’t feel like it’s effective because I wouldn’t go to an event based off a poster that looks like this. But then again, I don’t have a cat so maybe it’s just because I’m not exactly the target audience. This poster looks like a meme to me, like there wasn’t a lot of thought put into the layout or font or format. The text is piled on top of a colorful low res photo, and it looks like the creator put borders and shadows behind the text to make it more readable. It’s still takes effort to make out the words and that’s already a fail to me. The shadow styles and colors are all different, there are 3–4 different fonts going on here and some texts are randomly positioned. The QR code on the left is also inconveniently tilted. This caption is definitely supposed to be taken as a joke but I have no motivation to actually read it because the font is tiny compared to the rest of big screaming text in the rest of the poster. It seems like there are a lot of afterthoughts in this design and doesn’t seem well-organized, but I guess that’s to be expected in an event hosted by cats. All these elements seem to work against each other so I don’t think this was effective publicity for the event.
