Project 5: Poster Series

I was really excited about this project because poster-making is required for a lot of the organizations I am in and I was really fascinated to see what would draw people in and keep their attention focussed on your poster.

Research

When starting this project, I didn’t really have an idea on what art festival I wanted to design for. I looked through many posters and pinpointed the ones that I liked. I realized that the posters I liked the most are those with a double meaning or word play embedded within the poster.

Concept

I wanted to create posters for something that I identified with and music seemed the most intuitive. I went through my playlists and identified a couple artists in the same genre that I frequently listened to.

Next, I had to come up with a name. I looked at the name of some music festivals online but I wanted something that had depth to it. I looked up beautiful words’ online and came up with Petrichor: the earthy scent produce when rain falls on dry soil. I thought this name accurately represented the feel of the festival.

Logo

I wanted to incorporate elements of the meaning of the word while also keeping it pretty abstract. I played around with placement and font for a ‘P’ in a raindrop and finally decided on Birch Std. I like the idea of keeping the logo constant but the colors different across the poster so I worked with colors and gradients and finally decided on something I liked.

After looking at it for a while, I wanted to make the fact that it was a music festival a little clearer so I moved the text to under the raindrop and made the it bigger.

Sketches

I tried really hard to draw out posters that had double meanings. For each artist, I drew out two sketches.

I struggled a little with creating a unifying element and contextualizing it for each artist. I liked the idea of using a ukulele to communicate a connected theme of music but the ukulele looked too abstract in the sketches for Ben Howard.

Digitizing Sketches

Looking at the sketches for Ben Howard, I realized the message wasn’t as clear as I wanted it to be. I tried to bring out the fact that he was British but in the process I lost the ukulele element. I switched to George Ezra, a more well known artist, who is known for a picture of him standing with a guitar.

I thought that this illustration didn’t really match the images of the other two so I switched to Us The Duo. Us the Duo is a well known musical couple that recently got married and so I played with using the ukuleles to depict a married couple.

Interim Critique

After looking through the feedback and hearing what people in class had to say about my posters, I knew I had to refactor my color palette, make the font smaller and give some life to it (it was feeling a little too static). The purple poster didn’t seem to fit in to the series because of the color scheme so I decided to make that more purple and of the same hue as the other two.

Making it an Event

The feedback given on a lot of the posters was to make look like more of an event. I went back to my poster research and tried to identify elements that made it feel like an event poster rather than an informational poster. I saw that a lot of the posters had texture to them and began to brainstorm ideas on how to add texture to the poster. I looked at using a paper-like textured background but it didn’t sit well with me so I browsed through the different possibilities on illustrator and found the brush tool. I look at the different ones the software had to offer and like the watercolor-y effect the most. I worked with different brush sizes and placements of the effect until I found something I really liked.

Reevaluating the color scheme

I like the idea of keeping the base colors of the posters blue, green and purple but I wanted to incorporate some white to make the posters feel less heavy and change the shades of colors I was working with. I browsed Adobe Kuler for existing color palettes and tweaked them a little to come up with three completely different color schemes for each poster

The top row is the colors I started with and the bottom row is the colors I ended up with.

Reflection

I really liked working on this project because it is so relevant to our everyday life. I loved seeing how each student came up with a different event and how they thought to best represent it. The illustrations were really impressive. I really liked how much creative liberty we were given in this project because I could explore different ideas and work with things that were more personal to me the previous projects have been.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the final product. It definitely felt like it was an event poster and I think it is a lot more effective than the first iteration in communicating that.