Project 4: Poster Series Documentation
For this assignment, I chose to create a poster series revolving around events that might happen at an imaginary Chinese culture festival. Thinking of traditional aspects of Chinese culture, I decided on the following three events:
Calligraphy Exhibit
Chinese Dance Performance
Classic Chinese Film Screenings
The following are sketches I did for each idea.
In the end, I decided that for both aesthetic and ease of illustration, I’d go with some of the more minimalistic designs.
For my color palette, I wanted colors that would evoke that sort of Chinese aesthetic. Most people would immediately think of bright red and gold in regards to China, but I went looking for a more expansive color palette. I found this one on ColourLoversdotcom:
I liked that the tones were muted and don’t strain your eyes to look at them. It conveyed a really pleasant sort of zen feeling. I decided that each poster would have a “dominant” color for the background, with other colors accenting it.
Calligraphy Poster Process
Initially, I did not want to break the color palette, so I chose the darkest color (the maroon) as the brush tip and ink. However, it didn’t look quite right. I made the executive decision to break out of the palette for this poster, because the focus on calligraphy means that the brush and ink are essential to the image. This made the illustration look a lot bolder. Afterwards, I decided the background was too yellow, so I added a green rectangle on the top half. I liked that this way, it looked more like the brush was writing something on a piece of paper laid on a table or other flat surface. After receiving feedback in class, I enlarged the size of the text depicting the important info like Location, Hours, and Tickets, and shrunk the text in the paragraph to improve the hierarchy. I also darkened the maroon lettering to add contrast — and used the new darker shade of maroon instead of the one from the original palette in all the subsequent posters.
Dance Poster Process
Since I was going for minimalistic, I chose the sketch that had the least figurative elements in it. The streams were inspired by Chinese ribbon dancing. I made it so that the ribbons divided the poster up into sections, but would also lead the eye downward. The first iteration was still too plain, so I added another ribbon in the background, with low opacity to indicate depth. However, I then felt the poster was too red and yellow, and wanted to bring in more of the color palette, so I changed the color of the back ribbon to green. This poster was the main reason for my darkening the maroon color in the palette, as the original maroon did not have enough contrast with the red background.
Chinese Film Process
This one went through a lot. I ended up completely revamping my idea. I initially liked the minimalism of the film strip, but it was difficult to work into the composition in a fluid way that matched the previous two posters. I made a half-hearted attempt at the old-fashioned camera as well, before Julia suggested that maybe I was being too literal in my design for a film screening poster. She said that my other two posters evoked more of a mood or feeling of the event, and that the film imagery was uninspired. Julia suggested that I take inspiration from some of the films that were on the list of screenings.
Fortunately, one of the films on the list, Raise the Red Lantern, provided some simple and nice-looking imagery that was also obviously Chinese, so I decided to base my poster off of that. I changed the dominant poster color from green to maroon, so that it would contrast well with the lantern. I experimented with different lantern placements as well — two lanterns looked awkward, three took up too much space. The solution was to lower the opacity of the third lantern so that it fell back in the picture, and I could overlay the text on top of it.
Logo
Kaylee suggested during desk crits that I should connect all of my posters with a logo. I designed an image that was reminiscent of those octagonal Chinese windows, combined with a name stamp. The character in the middle is “zhōng”, literally “middle”, and also part of “中国” which is the Chinese name for China. Indeed, after I put the logo on the posters (the exact same spot on each one), my posters immediately gained a more official, professional quality.
Final Posters
Critique Feedback
I was happy to receive positive feedback during the critique, but unfortunately due to the time constraints it really only stopped there. I kind of wish that we had had more time to give constructive criticism. It felt like during most of critique we were just pointing out what was working in each poster before moving right along to the next one. I know we are crunched for time since the class is only 1 1/2 hours long, but I wish critiques could still be more expansive.
