Final Documentation for Event Poster (P4)

Introduction

The overall purpose of this project is to create a poster series of three posters that are clearly advertising an arts festival. Thus, it is important to ensure that the posters follow a theme and a structure that makes it clear that they all fall under one artistic festival. This project develops our understanding of how arts festivals are advertised using a certain brand and theme.

Following are the major details that had to be included in the event poster series:

The Name of the Arts Festival (this should be on all three posters and may be fictional)

Royal Music Festival

The Title of the Event

Poster 1: Kanye West

Poster 2: Eminem

Poster 3: Kendrick Lamar

The name(s) of the artist(s)

Kendrick, Eminem

The date, time, and location of the event (fictional)

Kendrick Lamar: 7 pm, Friday March 17th, Staples Center, Los Angeles

Eminem: 7 pm, Friday, March 24th, Comerica Park, Detroit

Kanye West: 7 pm, Friday, March 31s, All-American, Chicago

Relevant ticket information including price, how to purchase, etc. (fictional)

General Admission (for one concert): $70

VIP Package (for one concert; includes artist CD, poster, backstage meet and greet): $170

Above are some of the initial preliminary sketches that I had created when I was starting to understand the project and learn more about what I wanted to do. I am a hip-hop fanatic, so right when this event poster assignment was assigned, I knew that I wanted to create something for some type of a Hip Hop music festival. My first idea was to create a East meets West hip hop festival showcasing the major artists from both coasts: Eminem and Kendrick Lamar.

After a little more deliberation, I decided that I wanted to go with a royal theme, as I wanted the festival to showcase the “kings” of the rap industry. Going along this theme, I changed the title of the festival to the “Royal Music Festival”, and when the time came to start deliberating over my illustrations for the poster, I kept this royal theme in mind. The x’s in the boxes above mark where I would put my “royal” illustrations.

Above are the images from google that I chose to use for my illustrations. Going along with the royal theme, I chose the three main things you think of when you think of royalty: a castle, a throne, and a crown.

Above are my pen-tool illustrations of the images that I found. I was quite proud of these illustrations, as they took quite a bit of effort and required a lot of detail.

Keeping in mind the theme of royalty, I started playing around with the colors of my illustrations with colors that are often associated with royalty. Bright red, deep purple, and gold are always seen as being associated with royalty, so I kept this color scheme in mind when thinking about my overall poster.

Keeping the royal color scheme in mind, I explored various royal colors like blue, red, purple, and gold in kuler.com, and ended up with the above color scheme. I though that using the above colors as a base and adding tints of gold would really bring out the royal theme in the event.

I went ahead and tossed on my colored illustrations onto the event posters, and was really liking how the colors were working with each other. I especially liked the red throne on the purple background, as the tint of gold really brought out the throne. I was having a little difficulty with the third poster, as I didn’t love how the gold castle looked on the blue background, but I decided to keep it and see where it took me.

Continuing with this color scheme and adding tints of gold, I decided to make the poster title’s really stick out by making them gold with a white outlining. The typeface I used was also one that had very firm strokes and was quite loud, which was what I was going for in terms of hierarchy. So far the posters looked pretty good in my opinion, however, I still needed more elements to unify the poster as one series, and I decided that the event details would be a great way of doing this.

Therefore, I decided to create a standard format and structure for how i presented the event details. I centered the details on the first two posters and placed them in the same area with the same type face and format. I also included descriptions for the artists, as recommended on the assignment guidelines. Because the third poster was an overall event poster rather than an artist poster, I had to include both Eminem and Kendrick on to the poster, which made the third poster stand out a little more than I wanted it to. However, I felt like the royalty theme and the illustrations made it clear that this served as an event series, so I went ahead with using this draft as my first mini-critique draft.

After the mini-critique:

I received a lot of helpful feedback after the mini-critique. A lot of the feedback was positive, which I really appreciated. People liked how my structure was unified and it was easy to tell that it was an event series. My use of hierarchy was good too. The following are some things that I was suggested to work on:

• specific touch-ups on the illustration such as makings sure that the colors filled the entire illustration and making sure that the lines were complete and symmetric.
• Work a little more on the colors as there were quite a few colors present on the series which made it a little messy.
• Consider changing the third poster, as it stands out a little.
• Some poster names were in all caps, while some weren’t.
• Cut down on the words on the posters
• The third poster was a little out of place, maybe consider introducing another artist.

Using the feedback, I decided to keep the things that were working well and explore in the areas that could be improved

I decided to stick to the same illustrations that I had before the mini-crit because I received positive feedback on the illustrations, and I was really resonating with the royal theme they presented. One comment I received was that my colors seemed a little too eclectic and strong, and that going with this royal theme, I could mellow down my color choice a little bit. I agreed with this comment. So, I decided to go with the same base colors of blue, red and purple, but turn down the saturation to create a more mystic and serious feel, which really fits with the artist and festival theme.

Another recommendation that I really agreed with was adding something to the poster that made it even more clear that this was some sort of a musical show case, so I decided to add the Royal Music Festival presents at the top of the poster. The term “presents” really makes the series stick out as being an event poster.

I played a little bit with the structuring of the poster, by making the illustration bigger and on top of the poster title. The purpose of this was to emphasize the royal theme and make the illustrations a more significant aspect of the poster. in terms of hierarchy, this forces one to notice the artist title as well as the illustration right away. The third poster continued to give me some difficulty, as it was kind of difficulty to unify it with the two other posters. I was happy with what I had come up with in my second iteration, but I was not thrilled. The posters definitely projected as series, but it felt like something was not right. But, I gave myself the night to step away from it and decided to see how I felt the next day.

I decided that the colors were still bothering me a little, and maybe I did enjoy the eclectic feel that may first iteration had. In line with this, I started exploring with a half-grey color scheme, which I was I thought worked pretty well. I also added the touch of adding “Royal Music Festival” to the bottom of the two artist posters to unify all three posters a little more. Nonetheless, something was still not clicking with me when it came to the colors. I felt that the royal colors were a good touch but it was too much, and that I was forcing something.

I then quickly realized that the colors I was using were a little forced, and that the most elegant and grand background for my royal theme would be black. Touches of purple, red, and gold on top of the black would create a contrast which would really make the royal colors stand out. While, in my previous iterations, the royal colors were kind of all mixed together, which created a decent effect but was not as strong as it could be.

My predictions were starting to come true. I started putting together a poster that had a similar format to my other iterations, but I played a little more with the sizing. Furthermore, I received good feed back regarding the thickness and outlining of my illustrations, which I fixed as well. For example, the colors in my castle were incomplete, but I made sure that it had a solid color. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, the third poster, which was the overall event poster, was giving me a hard time throughout my process, because it was hard to make it fit into the overall poster series. So I realized that an easy fix to this problem would be to just eliminate the poster, and add another royal artist, Kanye West. This really worked well.

The addition of Kanye West, the contrast of the larger illustrations on a black background, the same structure in event details, the addition of “Royal Music Festival presents”, all came together to make this a simple yet elegant event poster series. Moreover, I kept the original hierarchy of having the artist name stick out first and the illustration come second, because I realized that this concert poster series is supposed to showcase the artist as being the most significant aspect of the concert. I also made the font of the details a shade of grey rather than white, as the white made the eye go straight to the event details, when the artist name should still be the most important subject.

I wanted to add one final touch the series by unifying the poster series with an event logo. So I created the RMF logo which stands for royal music festival and matched the color of the logo to the color of the illustrations which gave the posters a cool unifying touch. Below are the complete final versions of the posters.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project, as it made me think of how utilize design to convey that a group of posters are representative of the same event. I also enjoyed the final critique, and found it to be very useful. I received a lot of positive feedback stating that my poster really worked well as a series and looked just like what a concert poster series looked like. Some critiques I received included that the thickness of all my illustrations was not the same, which was subtlety that I can work on. In my next project, I am going to focus on really itching out the subtlety when it comes to making sure my illustrations are perfect and that there is complete unity even in the smallest details all across my poster series. Since it was my first time dealing with pen tools, I did have difficulty perfecting my illustrations and spent quite a bit of time trying, but I am happy with what I was able to produce.