Project Four | Poster Series

Process Documentation

Published in

Communication Design Fundamentals | Spring 2017

12 min readMar 8, 2017

Description:

In this project, we are asked to create a series of posters that visually introduce three different arts events held within a single arts festival. Each poster must include the following elements:

The Name of the Arts Festival (this should be on all three posters and may be fictional)
The Title of the Event
The name(s) of the artist(s)
One (short) paragraph about the artist(s) or the event itself
The date, time, and location of the event (fictional)
Relevant ticket information including price, how to purchase, etc. (fictional)

After some research, I decided to focues on 45th Hong Kong Arts Festival, and the following three events:

Tetris, Piano Recital, Dream of the Red Chamber.

Project Four | Poster Content Research

Art Festival: Hong Kong Arts Festival

medium.com

I. Sketching and Brainstorming

I did three sketches for each of the three events. Below are my sketches.

When I did my sketches for Tetris, one of the main inspiration is the Tetris game. I wanted to use squares of different colors to illustrate the idea of Tetris. For the Piano Recital poster, I used elements such as piano, the keyboard, and notes. The Dream of the Red Chamber is a famous Chinese novel, so I wanted to use more Chinese elements such as traditional Chinese buildings, gates, and the outline of a figure from Chinese Opera. The logos of the arts festival are put on all the posters to show that the three events are of the smae festival.

II. Poster Design Draft 1

For the piano recital poster, I developed based on my second sketch. The top part of the poster illustrates a grand piano. Since the piano recital was about classical music, I used Baskerville for all the texts in the poster.

I used the thrid sketch for my poster draft of Tetris. When I saw this event on the website, the first word that jumped into my mind was playful. To show the playfulness of the event and make more interesting, I decided to make the poster as a Tetris board. I also experimented with the “i” in “Tetris” and finally decided to use the 4 x 1 piece so that it felt like a piece falling down. Since the squares at the bottom took up quite a lot of space, I put all the information about the event (title, data, location etc.) centered, and only made the event name and the performance group more obvious.

Design Process 1 — Pen Tool (Dream of the Red Chamber)

The poster draft was designed based on my first sketch, where I used elements such as moon, gate, and night. I found a picture of a gate on traditional Chinsese buildings, and drawed the gate and its knobe using Pen Tool. The backgrounf color was navy / dark blue to show it was a nigh sky.

Design Process 1 — poster (Dream of the Red Chamber)

The Dream of the Red Chamber is a tragedy, so the “dream” is a broken dream. Therefore, I used clipping mask to divide the Dream into half, and then put them together to illustrate the idea of “broken dream”. I also experimented with a few differnt colors of the moon. Some lighter colors looked like the color of the moon, but the contrast was very low given the white text. Eventually, I used this orange color which gave better contrast with the white text. For this event, there are a lot of information about the whole production team that I felt necessary to put on the poster. It was impossible to use a centered layout as the Tetris poster. So I used a two-column format, which also went well with the two gates on the left and right. I also used the different color the highlight information about the date/location and the production team.

Above are the first draft of my three posters. To show the three events are of the same arts festival, I only used the same logo on each of them. However, when I saw the posters of my classmates, I realized that my posters did not communicate as a series at all. In fact, most feedback that I received was also about this issue.

Here are some of the main points:

The posters did not function as a series.
Low color contrast (especially the dream of the red chamber, and the piano recital)
Hard to tell some of them were event posters
Confusing hierarchy for some part

Other than the feedback, there were also some take-aways from the first crit session.

To show the posters are of the same arts festival, I could use the same layout / similar colors for all three posters.
To show that they are event posters, I have to highlight the date / time other than the name of the event.
The one short paragraph about the artist / event may be too long to read. It can be more succint, and it would not take too much space.
Explore more typefaces that convey the nature of the event

I made some changes to my first draft based on the feedback and take-aways.

III. Poster Design Draft 2

The main problem with my first draft was the lack of common layout / theme to show the the three posters belong to the same series. Each of them looked independent of one another. To tackle this problem, I began by using the same layout / grid for all of them. All of my three posters would have a centered layout, where from top to bottom are the name of the event, the artist, an image, a one-sentence intro, and date/location/ticket infor.

For the Piano Recital poster, I used the keyboard from draft 1 as my image. I also played with a few different typefaces to see which one match the general shape of the image in the center. For the second draft, I picked Braggadocio as the typeface for the event title. To highlight that this is an event poster, I placed the date and time on the blackbackground and used relatively larger size (24pt). I kept the white background as in Draft 1.

Similar changes were made to the other two posters.

I used the tetris board I created in the first draft as the image for this second draft. The layout is the same as that of the piano recital poster, where everything is centered. I also used a box at the bottom to highlight date, location, and ticketing information.

Among the feedback I received last time, someone pointed out that the original “i” in “Tetris” (the 4 x 1 piece) did not work very well. Personally, I also felt that using squares as “i” would be redundant given the “T” was already of similar form. I also experimented with the typefaces for the event title, and used Copperplate becuase of its geometric nature. In addition, after I finalized on the typeface, I changed the “T” in “Tetris” to a normal letter “T”. This was to ensure that the three posters would be more consistent in terms of the event title and overall format.

The text in the box at the bottom was of the same size as that in the piano recital poster but of different typeface.

For the third poster, Dream of the Red Chamber, I found an image online and drew a new image using Pen Tool. The image was a traditional Chinese building (temple) which echos the nature of the event.

Design Process 2 (Dream of the Red Chamber)

Same as the previous two posters, I used the same layout for this one.

Initally I wanted to use the orignial design of the event title, but I realized that the size and the typeface of the text did not fit into the poster very well. So I searched a few more typefaces for the event title.

I played with the color of the image and found out the darker red gave a better contrast with the navy background. Therefore, I used the one on the right as the tentative image for second draft.

My second draft for this poster was not entirely complete as I was having some difficulties fitting the list of production team in the poster. I planned to ask for more advice on the posters during the work session.

IV. Working towards the final version

During the work session, Kaylee gave some very helpful advice on how to make further changes to make the three posters more like poster series.

Despite that they all had the same layout, the background color, color palettes, the typeface were not consistent enough to for the posters to functoin as a poster series. They were still very independent at this stage. Based on her recommendation, I decided to make the following changes:

All three posters use the same typeface for event name, artists, text, and date/location/ticketing info.
Use a new color palette and each poster shoul echo with one another in terms of colors.
Search for typefaces for the data/location/ticketing info.
The ticketing info could be of lower hierarchy as compared to date and location.
I could use the same style of illustration for three images.

Inspirations

I searched online for some event poster series and realized that almost all of them use the same illustration style for images, same typeface for event name, and consistent color palette for all the posters. Therefore, I moved on to figuring out a color palette for my posters first.

Color Palette

The left is the color palette that I used for my final design.

Other than the color palette, I also changed my illustration styles for the images in the posters. All the images only have outlines, and the fill was left blank, because I felt that using only the outline especially worked for the tetris board; using a single color for the tetris board would diminish the meaning. I also changed the image of piano as the image in the second draft was relatively more abstract (see below). The images have the same weight for stroke.

After I finalized the color palette and images, I began choosing the right color combination between background color and the image. I tried a few different options:

I kept the background color of the Dream of the Red Chamber (Dream) poster red so that the color of the poster would have more relation with the theme of the event. I tried different colors for the Chinese temple / building. The purple seemed to be resonating on the red background, so I avoided this color combination for all the posters. The contrast between yellow image on the red background was low copmared to a green image. Therefore, for the final poster of Dream, I used the “green on red” combination.

For the Tetris poster, I used the orange background color because orange is a more lively. playful color than the rest colors, and this fits well with the nature of Tetris (event). For the Piano Recital poster, I eventually chose green/turquoise as the background color because it is brighter than the purple and the color contrast of yellow piano on the turquoise background is better.

Then I moved on the the typeface and details of the design. It was hard to choose a single typeface that would match the themes of all three events. For the Piano Recital poster, I would like the typeface to be sans serif and have very nice curve as the piano does. For the Tetris poter, the typeface should have a geometric nature. For the Dream poster, I may have to do a trade-off between using a more romantic typeface and maintaining the consistency of the posters. After trying a few different options (Gill Sans, Baskerville, Helvetica etc.), I used Futura for all the texts in the posters.

To highlight the date and location of the event, the date and location were in bold, and larger font size (24pt), whereas the ticketing information were in regular weight and smaller size (14pt).

When adjusting the grid and layout for the three posters, I realized that it was impossible to fit every words in the title for the Dream poster. Therefore, I tweaked the size of the “Dream of the” and kept “Red Chamber” at larger font size so that spacing would not look awkward (see figure above). However, the size of “Red Chamber” is smaller than those of the event name of other two posters due to space constraint.

I used the same grid for all the three posters and made sure that the size of the image was relatively constant for all three posters. The logos of the arts festival were also slighly changed so that the color of the two circles match the color of the image.

V. Final Posters

The above is the final version of the posters.

VI. Reflection

One of flaws of my posters is that I forgot to use en dash for for date range. I totoally neglected the use of dash when designing posters.

My reflection after this assignment:

Look at more sample posters design before starting my sketches so that I would have a better sense of the requirements / necessary elements for design project.
Start earlier next time.
Be more familiar with using Pen Tool and other functions of Illustrator.