Poster series documentation

My poster idea started off very vague. I wanted to outline silhouettes of dancer’s bodies and place text around it, either publicizing three acts in one dance show or three different dance shows for different types of dance. My other idea was doing a fashion show and creating three posters for different themed fashion lines in the runway show (experimental, organic, structured). I drew my sketches on a scratch paper I can’t seem to find, but the sketches of the bodies of the dancers were very fundamental and disproportionate.

I developed the event my posters were showcasing to be a bit different. Everyone has seen dance posters before, and I wanted my event to be more than a dance show. I decided to make a dance trilogy, and I even gave the trilogy a story. There were three parts to the story of a young dancer and her encounter with fame: the wanting, the having, and the losing. I then based everything else about the poster to focus on this buildup, climax, and resolution storyline, starting with the dancer’s poses. I chose these three:

Each pose carries an emotion I thought depicted the corresponding story fragment well. The first looks like she’s reaching for something– fame, in this case. The second is a diva moment, or the peak of her fame. The third depicts a forlorn, delicate pose which conveys the grievance of being forgotten.

When we had our first crit, Julia came over and commented on how the imperfection of the awkward hand-drawn bodies were interesting, so the idea of my poster came from there. My favorite artist is this dude named quibe, and he makes simple and powerful line drawings so I decided to try drawing like that in illustrator. Here’s an example of one of his drawings:

So I chose to draw each of these bodies using a single line, barely outlining features of the body. The point is to draw as little as possible but depict all the emotion, intensity, and physicality of the image.

By the interim crit, I had this:

The name of the trilogy is “presque-vu.” Directly translated it means almost seen but it essentially means something you’ve forgotten but can almost remember, like it’s right at the tip of your tongue. The shows are individually called “près” which means close, “voir” which means seen, and “oublié” which means forgotten. They are placed at the fingertips of the bodies as if objects balancing on the dancers. The titles are also tilted pointing toward the middle poster, because the peak of fame is the focus in life. Everything kind of leads up to or fades from it. The fading of the colors are also symbolic of the story it tells. The first poster is mostly pink, and grows up into the mature purple at the edge. The second poster is mostly basking in the purple spotlight until it starts to fade into a melancholy blue. The last poster is all blue, depicting the sad reality that in life, people spend most of their time reminiscing about what was. I wanted a cohesive element so I decided to also make an organization that hosted the dance show named Contemporary Symposium (in reference to CMU’s own Dancer’s Symposium). I also chose an elegant cursive because contemporary dance is known to be classy and beautiful.

The critique I received was that the white was impossible to read, the words balancing on the bodies needed to be thinner to seem as though it were interacting with the drawings, and I was missing an element– the paragraph. I also lacked a grid. To solve this, I changed the font of the dance organization to a more serious one that was also much more readable, I changed the font of the titles to keep the simplistic aesthetic but allowed for thinner text. I made sure the company name, paragraph, and information followed a grid and I also changed color of most of the text to a soft grey, ensuring readers could be fully captivated by the delicate line drawing and fancy french words.

These were my final posters:

In the end, my only dissatisfaction is the way the color fading was lost in the first poster. The pink and purple I chose were too similar and there doesn’t seem to be an ombre effect at all. Otherwise, I think the posters work cohesively and individually, and publicizes the event well. It draws in an audience interested in elegant dance, and upon reading the paragraph they understand the trilogy and the particular section of the storyline they’ll catch at the show.