Poster Series Documentation
Research
When I started doing research for this project, I already knew I wanted to do a poster series of classical music, since that was an art form I was very familiar with. During the lecture on color palettes, I decided that I wanted to use the primary colors blue, yellow, and red with black and white for my poster series. The reason behind this is that there are distinct emotions and moods associated with different classical pieces, and I felt that the most basic, primary colors would communicate those moods most clearly. As discussed in lecture, blue is calming, somewhat mysterious; yellow is energetic and joyful; red is also energetic and passionate. I was also inspired by a French movie series I had seen before, where each movie poster was one hue, with one blue, one white, one red. So I sought to chose my events based on this primary color palette idea.
However, I decided that the moods for non-programmatic classical music (the music is not set specifically to any story line, or concrete meaning) may be too abstract to for the audience to be able to quickly understand the color choices. I eventually decided to use three ballets instead, because of how well known ballets stories are. Due to my limited abilities in Illustrator vs. sketching on paper, I looked at simple ballet poster illustrations such as silhouettes, symbols and representative objects from ballets. I eventually chose to do Swan Lake for the blue poster (due to it’s graceful, mysterious, and slightly sad plot, and the blue backdrop in actual productions); Nutcracker for the yellow poster (due to it’s joyful, magical Christmas mood); and Don Quixote for the red poster (due to it’s Spanish style, passionate music, and the female lead’s famous red dress).
Sketching and Planning
Since I didn’t do as well as I wanted to on the previous hierarchy project, this time I decided on the hierarchy of my content before starting any sketching. The most important bit of information would be that these posters were for ballets, and the title of the ballets. Then the festival name (at the time my festival name was just the ballet company’s name), then names of the male and female lead grouped with the less important description of each dancer, then the event details. Then I sketched out various layouts for each of the three posters. My first choice was to feature a ballerina in the middle of the poster, and a huge title as my “50 ft” feature. The ballerina would serve as a structural foundation for the grid layout of the rest of the content. The festival name would span across the top, or bottom of the poster in all caps letters. The lead dancers’ names are grouped with their corresponding background information, and all the event information would be grouped in one block of organized text. However, to prepare for the case where I’m unable to draw a good ballerina on Illustrator, I also explored using symbols from each of the ballets. For each of the ballets, I tried to experiment with how simple the illustration could be while still portraying the ballet clearly. For Swan Lake, I considered using a swan, the swan queen’s crown, or a feather as the centerpiece, and also using the ‘S’ in Swan Lake to form the swan. For Nutcracker, I experimented with the iconic nutcracker toy, a Christmas tree (did not sketch), and even just the fairy’s wand. For Don Quixote, the choice was obvious — the red and black fan used by the female lead in one of the most well known ballet dance variations.
In my sketches, I also tried various arrangements of the content that would fit well with each of the ballerinas’ positions, while preserving common structural elements across the three posters. As each of the ballerinas would ideally have a different position to add variation and energy to the series, I decided that the event information and dancer information could move around, while the title and festival name would be the common structural elements.
I then explored how to use the background to further emphasize the primary color palette, and communicate my content most clearly. In the previous assignment, my poster was monochromatic, with one brown hue and various shades of that same tone. I had a difficult time predicting how the colors would turn out on the actual prints, and my final poster lacked contrast. Therefore, this time I decided to go a safer route by increasing the contrast between text, the image, and the background.
One idea I had for this was to use either a pure white or pure black background, and the opposite color for text. However, if the text was all one color, it would limit my options for establishing hierarchy. Also, the pure white and pure black background turned out to be too stark of a contrast to the poster content. In addition to clarity, I also wanted the poster to have the soft color transitions of a ballet production. So I played around with adding abstract, semi-transparent splashes of the poster color to the pure white/black background. This would soften the background, and I could also use the abstract blobs to form a stage like backdrop (curtains, set, lighting…etc).
First Draft
I started out with using various shades of blue in many abstract shapes on a white background. However, there were too many shapes in the background would most likely compete with the poster content. So I tried a different approach — instead of using many irregular shapes, I only used three simple overlapping circles, like a Venn Diagram. Due to the transparency, the areas of overlap would have the brightest (or darkest) color depending on whether the background was black or white. This works well for my poster structure because it draws attention to the center ballerina illustration. I also liked how my final arrangement of the circles looked like spotlights, so that the ballerinas looked like they were on stage without any complicated stage/set imagery in the background.
During this time I also tried various display fonts for the title. While I was making the first draft, I imagined that an old fashioned font with flourishes or serifs fit the classical music theme well. However, after asking Julia for advice, she suggested that I go with a simpler, more modern looking font. I realized that most modern ballet posters do use very “clean” fonts, such as sans serif fonts with low contrast.
After replicating the background and basic content for all three posters quickly, I experimented with using different shades of the blue/yellow/red, and white vs. black background. I used lighter tones for the circles on a black backgrounds, and darker tones on white backgrounds for contrast. It seems that white text stands out more on the black background with colored circles, than black text on white background with colored circles. Also, the black background fit the stage-like theme more, so I decided on using the black background.
At first, I intended to create masks for each poster and cut off the circles where they bled off the pages. However, with the three posters placed side by side on Illustrator, I realized that having the circles bled into neighboring posters adds continuity to the poster series, so I kept it as it is. Also, the overlapping areas worked well with my color palette choice because the intersecting regions formed secondary colors that act as a color and mood transition to the next poster.
Before I proceeded with the poster designed, I had to decided if drawing the ballerina illustrations was within my abilities. I looked at many different ballet positions, and tried to pick positions that that would allow space and good positions for the text (in terms of hierarchy). For Swan Lake and Don Quixote I also tried to pick positions that represented the ballets’ stories well and matched the mood of the ballets.
My Illustration method:
- Import compressed source image into Illustrator (since I couldn’t place the original images)
- Trace the image on a separate layer
- Hide image, and adjust trace for smoother edges, clarity and aesthetics
- Repeat until I found the trace satisfactory
- Add color to individual shapes in trace and remove outline
Now that I knew I could draw the ballerinas, I copied the same ballerina to to other two posters and adjusted them slightly. I then sent this to Julia and asked for feedback. She suggested me to add more contrast to the spotlights to make the concept more obvious, to play around with the scale of the ballerinas, and also to use a less traditional font (mentioned above).
After looking at my posters more, I decided to spend the time to trace two more ballerinas since the slight adjustments to the original blue ballerina didn’t make the posters unique enough, and I didn’t want them to look copy-pasted.
I also followed Julia’s advice and made the dancers’ names a modern, sans serif font, and the title text a simpler, but still serif font (Garamond).
I then added the proper content to the posters, and created a grid for the content based on the ballerinas. The three posters have slightly different placement for the dancer info due to the differences in the ballerinas’ positions, but this adds variety to the poster series without being too chaotic and reducing the relationships too much.
I removed the top circle on each poster to allow more contrast between the title text and the black background, as well as to separate the top and bottom of the poster. I felt that this went along with Julia’s advice, to create more drama by contrast, and also to bring more attention on the spotlighted area.
Feedback from Interim Critique
When the posters were printed, the blue spotlights turned out to be very dark, which made the Swan Lake ballerina almost invisible. All the spotlights were darker than expected, so I made the spotlights lighter colors in my revisions. People seemed to like the continuity of the spotlights, so I kept that.
One of the most important constructive comments I got was that I had too much text, and that the event info was too small. Also, I didn’t need to have information on each lead performer, I just needed one or two sentences on the overall event.
Revisions
The first issue I addressed rethinking my hierarchy. I deleted the dancer info, and made the event information much larger. Inspired by the ballet poster series I found, I formatted the event information in a rectangular block with very little rag. I also tried using different fonts other than Helvetica to see if I could get a more modern, clean look.
Next I worked on placing the content to maintain good hierarchy. I also made important parts of the event information a light shade of the primary color as a highlight, and to make the information more organized and clear.
After finding places for everything except the event description, I brought back my gridlines and aligned everything.
I then worked on organizing the credits section by aligning combining the lead dancers’ names and the credits section, and aligning the dancers names. I also used the same technique of the light primary tone highlight as I used in the event information.
The description looked off balance to the left or right of the title, and Julia suggested me to keep the width of the description short (more closed form). Eventually I decided that the description looked most balanced in the center, and with width shorter than the title width.
Someone commented that since the Nutcracker ballerina and Don Quixote ballerina had objects in their hands, the Swan Lake ballerina should too. So I gave her a feather to hold.
Lastly, I adjusted the spotlight colors to make them even brighter (I was afraid the print job would lower the contrast significantly).
