CDF Project 4: Poster Series

Introduction

In this assignment, we were tasked with designing a series of three posters that display or advertise some arts event. While these posters are expected to be distinct, they should still be able to communicate that the posters are related in some way. Besides basic logistical information that had to be included, we were restricted in the following ways:

• we could only use 2–3 hues across all three posters + black and white
• we could only use up to 2 type faces
• all three posters must face the same orientation

For this project, I wanted to create a 3-day Asian food festival, featuring foods from the three main sections of Asia — East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. This basic structure made it fairly convenient to divide my event into three days/sections. Each day and poster would feature one cuisine, as well as advertise vendors specific to the type of cuisine.

Initial Sketches

I drew some initial sketches of my ideas; in these iterations, I just wanted to sketch some basic ideas in order to just get everything required onto the canvas. Below are my first two iterations of hand-illustrated sketches:

All the information left-aligned and in the same grid; only illustrations here are the flags representing countries on each day.

All the required information center-aligned; examples of food that could be seen on each day below.

My initial ideas revolved around a literal interpretation of what food or countries were represented at my fictional event. While this seemed like a reasonable idea, upon initial feedback of my drawings, I hoped to see whether my literal interpretation of objects in my poster was too constraining.

Digital Iterations

I wasn’t exactly sold on simply showing flags on my poster, as simply showing represented countries seemed a bit too literal and doesn’t exactly attract the reader in any way. As a result, I iterated on my second set of drawing to create a digital draft of this. In order to create the illustrations, I used the pen tool to trace some characteristic “finger foods” that one might see at an Asian food festival. I wanted to maintain a consistent brush edge and a somewhat realistic interpretation of the food I was advertising.

One more thing to consider at this step was color schemes. I knew initially that I wanted a strong red color, as many East Asian cultures see red as significant in meaning (often indicating some form of prosperousness). Additionally, I wanted to incorporate yellow because I’d thought it would complement red as a primary color, and could possibly add contrast between posters. The color schemes I came up with were as below:

Three potential color schemes I came up with (by row)

Out of the three color schemes above, I wanted colors that seemed more forward and less “mellow”, which steered me away from the first row’s color scheme. Additionally, after some experimentation with an online color picker, I thought that with some tweaks, a good third color to include would be some shade of dark blue. After significant trial and error, I thought that the middle color scheme seemed more appropriate to try and obtain a “hip, modern” look.

Laying out all the text elements similarly to my initial sketches, I came up with the following initial digital iteration:

Initial digital iterations.

Feedback/Critiques

My posters seemed to receive very mixed feedback from my peers during the interim critique. Most people thought that the color scheme was acceptable; however, its usage could be significantly improved upon.

One thing to notice in these three posters was that all the text elements remained in the same places, and this indicated that while it’s clear my poster is a poster about food, having three separate posters doesn’t provide much differentiation or cohesion as a series (ie. having only one of these posters would be sufficient). In further digital iterations, I hoped to vary the structure of each poster, as to maintain some consistency between them while not feeling too repetitive.

I also received some mixed feelings about my pen-tool art; some thought it was creative and others thought their alignment made it seem hard to appreciate.

Further Digital Iterations

Because I was told by multiple people that the visual hierarchy in each individual poster was reasonable, I didn’t want to change much in each poster’s inherent structure. As a result, I made sure that each of the text elements contained the same content, but no one poster looked too similar or too different from the other two. Because I’d put a lot of effort into my pen-tool illustrations, I still wanted to include them in further iterations; additionally, I liked the fact that they were confined within circles but I wanted to possibly change up the layout to attract the viewer’s eyes more.

I played around with the layouts of each element, disregarding color temporarily. After playing around for a little while, I came up with a rough set of layouts below:

Intermediate iteration. I scrapped colored elements, as I first wanted to focus on potential layouts of text elements that would make them seem less repetitive.

While I thought this was an improvement, I also felt that this still left room for the reader to fail to differentiate between the foods in each day. Because the circles are placed in the same place in each poster, I felt that the viewer could easily overlook the fact that each cuisine is indeed unique.

I then tried to vary the location of each element, including the food, so that upon viewing, a viewer would be forced to move their eyes with respect to each poster, and explicitly notice that each food within each circle is unique to the day. Additionally, while I played around with color more, I thought that adding two colors without including a third could possibly lead to one poster being out of place. As a result, I chose to instead include different opacities of each individual color in each poster to maintain consistency.

After another long while, I came up with this iteration of posters, as seen below for a final set of critiques from Robert as the deadline approached:

Near-final iteration of posters

While I was more satisfied with this series, I thought the use of lines to distinguish pieces of information of varied importance, Robert did point out that in the blue poster, the lack of any diagonal lines to separate information also made it such that it lacked visual anchors as a viewer to gauge direction of information. With some small fixes to the orientations of some items in the blue poster, I inched closer to my final iteration.

Final Piece

Below is the final poster series I presented to the class:

Reflection

I felt that the entire poster series process very much challenged me as a designer due to its few constraints compared to previous projects. After I had solidified my final idea, I struggled significantly with determining what kinds of visualizations to include and how to combine this in a non-interfering way with other text elements.

A few things I would do differently with more time would be to explore more color schemes and possibly explore ways to subtly express the countries’ cultures within the background. I think that although I was mostly satisfied with my separation of elements, adding this more specific to cultural background of the countries represented in my poster could help draw the reader more into it. A smaller element to consider would be how the colors get printed on cardstock. For example the opacity differences I was able to show digitally were clearly not as evident in my final poster prints; additionally, the blue I wanted to display turned out much more purple than I had wanted, and the colors as a whole were significantly darker, making it harder to read some of the black text in my blue and red posters..