Poster Series Project
For our assignment the objective was to make a 3 poster series on events in an art festival. I decided to do a poster series on the Bijitsu Art Festival, an event I made up which celebrates Japanese art through history. It consists of three showcases; shamisen, kabuki theatre, and animated films.
Conception
I thought up of several ideas before coming to my current idea of posters about Japanese culture. I originally was thinking of concerts and rock bands, along with more western operas, but I really wanted to play with Japanese animated movies of which I am a fan, especially Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away. To tie it all together I decided to go with the Japanese motif.
For the style I decided to use silhouettes, since they were simple yet distinctive. The biggest reason, however, was because I am a fan of the following Star Wars posters.
I love the way the silhouettes indicate clearly which character they are based on, and how the environments are distinctive inside their bodies, indicative of the movies they are based on. In addition, I wanted to work with Japanese calligraphy in my posters, as I am a huge fan of Sumi-e brush writing. Based on these factors, I made my initial sketches.
I wanted to play around with putting images inside the initial silhouette, like the Star Wars posters that served as inspiration. However, I felt like that would be too complicated to make, so I went with my first options; silhouettes with Japanese characters inside them (which represented the specific era in Japanese history the art form corresponded to).
First Iteration
Having made my sketches, I made my initial designs in Adobe Illustrator. To capture the Sumi-e brush strokes, I used the ジンへな墨流-RCF font. For the descriptions and event info, I used Lato.
The goal of the designs was to make figures that were distinctive to that art form; the shamisen was distinctive to Edo era music, the mask and face paint was distinctive to Meiji era Kabuki Theatre, and the mask was an important feature of the character No Face in the movie Spirited Away, one of Japan’s highest grossing animated films in the current Heisei era. I included the description of the events as well as the event information, which I made bigger to make it easily view-able from a distance.
Having had several of my peers review the piece, I determined several things. Some of pros included: the font style and color scheme are good (since they link the posters), good use of bold and regular font, good contrast in colors, and good usage of different font styles for different things. Some of the cons included: layout between the posters are too similar, the shamisen doesn’t fit the masks, use white space better, the leading might be too much (making the poster messy), too much repetition, and not enough consideration into the hierarchy.
Second Iteration
Based on the feedback, I went about redoing my posters.
The first thing I set about fixing was the repetition in each poster, as well as the shamisen not fitting the mask motif I had unknowingly placed. I decided to make silhouettes of a figure performing the art form, which I felt helped to tie all of the pieces together while still being distinct, with the specific instrument or defining feature highlighted in red, while the entire silhouette sat within a red circle, or the rising sun which is an important Japanese symbol. I also took out the writing inside the images as I thought it increased the clutter of the poster, which I didn’t want. At first I wanted a paper cut out look by adding red outlines to all the shapes, but I decided against that.
In addition, I made the backgrounds of the posters different colors so as to make them more distinct, with the colors based on traditional colors used in Japanese artwork. In addition, I tied up the leading and tried to make more negative space within my pieces.
Conclusion
Once I finished my final iteration, I printed out a 10" x 16" poster and presented it to my peers. This project taught me a lot about the importance of hierarchy in my pieces. I hope to use these skills in my future projects!
