Poster Series Process Documentation
My initial idea for an event to design posters for was CMU’s Spring Carnival. I took the events from https://www.springcarnival.org/events.shtml. For the actual acts for the events, I wanted much larger names than what CMU normally brings to campus. The overall idea was for the posters to have a graphic quality to them, due to the restrictions in color, and for them to be immediately eye-catching and attention-grabbing.
My first sketches focused on the defining characteristics of the first artist I chose, Florence and the Machine. Because the designs were made with Florence in mind, the posters for the comedy act, Bo Burnham, and CMU Buggy were not as relevant. I tried to keep similar themes throughout the designs to have a uniting factor.
Unfortunately, I found there was a high similarity between the Florence and the Machine designs and the Bo Burnham design, but a disconnect with those two and the CMU Buggy. It did not help that Buggy does not focus on the face of a single iconic act, but rather the race as a whole. I made further sketches for CMU buggy trying to incorporate humans more into the sketch while trying to keep the recognizable buggy shape clear.
Ultimately, I decided on combining aspects of multiple buggy sketches into one sketch so that all three events would feature a person saying the name of their event. I varied the scale among all three so that it would not appear as if two posters were more related than the third.
I then created posters for interim critique based on this design. I was rushed in making these posters, so I did not put as much thought into the placement of poster elements as I would have liked. I also did not make any iterations on these posters to begin with.
I chose the colors to be two light, warm colors and one dark, cool color to make the posters bright and eye-catching. It was important to me to create an eye-catching poster, since most of the time posters blend in with one another on a wall and I only notice the ones that are significantly different. Solid, flat, graphic styles with limited palettes seemed like the best choice to me.
After the critique, most of the comments were that they enjoyed the graphic quality of the posters, and my choice of colors. However, the placement of text could have more thought. The choice of colors and style was a largely unifying factor in the posters, but one person thought that the Florence and the Machine poster did not seem like it belonged. There was also no clear overarching event that all three of these posters belonged to, which in this case was CMU Carnival. I had relied on the implicit knowledge of CMU Buggy to have people draw those conclusions, but were the posters seen individually the Carnival theme would have not been clear.
Based on these comments, I felt like to further unify the posters and provide clarity and a purposeful placement of information, I should
- include a logo
- create some sort of separation between the actual poster and the information it presented.
Based on these two ideas, I iterated on creating a band across the bottom of the posters to display the information I wanted to convey. The time, location, and ticket information was all equally important to me, but in order to chunk the information better I added a line to separate the time/location and ticket information. Finally, since some of the posters seemed a little static, I added “motion” elements to the speech blocks to add more visual interest.
Finally, after critique, I got comments that the poster was clear to a CMU Student, but to an outsider, something that would indicate that Bo Burnham was a comedian or what CMU Buggy was at first glance might be useful. The hierarchy of the poster and the usage of the rectangle to separate out the information from the graphics were both effective to people. Overall, I would say that the poster series was successful, and it really made me pay attention to hierarchy in a different way than the typography poster.
