C Studio Project Two
Week One, September 13
The in-class discussion we held was really helpful in highlighting the purpose of the exercises and some of the effects I can achieve through type hierarchy. I’d like to reflect the gravity of the writers and their influence without making it too somber; the event seems like a celebration of literature, of ideation, and of togetherness. I think I can achieve a sense of stability by lowering the leading in my text blocks, and incorporate a sense of fun through part two of the project. Also have to remember viewing distances! I think my text skews a little large right now so I need to identify the balance between readability and aesthetic I’m trying to strike.
Week Two, September 20
We’ve covered a lot of ground this week: adding color, altering scale, and throwing images into the mix. When I looked into my organization, I identified some keywords that described it. I placed these adjectives side-by-side in my sketchbook with some color palettes assembled from magazine scraps. This was really fun; I liked the ease of exploration that came with just tearing out shades and mixing them together without any permanence. However, I always find the transition from this hands-on, sketchbook phase to digital media a little clunky; I need to refer back to my mock-ups more often in my process in order to remember my initial observations and build upon those ideas. If I can rely more thoughtfully on both, I think I would develop a necessary sense of perspective throughout my work. As it is, most of my early color iterations were just me gravitating towards my favored palettes once the infinite range of pixellated color was at my hands. Not super pertinent to my specific organization or any organization at all.
Seeing everyone else’s choices on Tuesday was inspiring! I wanted to be bolder with my colors and clearer with my hierarchy, as I hadn’t really changed the order of the text even after we were allowed to. I did some more research about my organization after Vicki introduced part three of the project. Passionate, organic, diverse, contemporay, intimate, and celebratory, Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures feels powerful. I let those adjectives influence my choices during Thursday’s work day, resulting in brighter color palettes and some pretty narrow margins to channel some of that frenetic energy and creativity. I came up with more effective iterations today by following that line of analysis, but I also talked to Juan, and in light of the time and freedom I have to explore, I loosened up a little in my interpretation. Also! Committed to creating a grid, because some of my text placement just felt too arbitrary and cluttered. I have content I’m excited to work on and refine for the final.
Week 3, September 27
In incorporating images into my poster, I began by experimenting with different color palettes and moods. I used stock photos from unsplash.com, as well as a few of my own photos, to see how best to evoke the experience of the lecture series. I had a hard time deciding which angle I wanted to pursue, because some of my adjectives for the organization felt contradictory- at times youthful and contemporary (which I tried to emphasize in the iteration on the left), other times starkly thought-provoking and more mature (top right). Along the way, I created two grids- one 6 column and one 12 column- to enhance my organization of content. I liked the flexibility of the 12 column, so I extended that base through a few of my different versions. However, I was still unsatisfied with the one-dimensional qualities that these images spoke to; I wanted them to reflect the complexity and richness of the event. I found this image by Viktoria Sotsugova on unsplash.com and instantly felt that it resonated with my interpretation of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures with its combination of straight and curved lines and its color palette.
Having decided on my image, I then had to work around some of its restrictions; the blocks of color limited my text placement to certain areas in order to maintain high contrast and readability, and my old grid didn’t mesh too well with this new image on top of it. I wasn’t satisfied with any of my iterations in which text overlapped different color blocks because some of them read as unintentional. During this stage, I spent the most time rearranging the body text with the author, book title, and lecture date. Having five blocks of text was really challenging, leading to organization based on more arbitrary factors (i.e. grouping lectures based on month of occurrence), detracting from the overall hierarchy on the page. I had to work around a constant sense of imbalance.
My iteration for Tuesday’s critique saw me moving towards more extreme contrasts in type size after comparing print-outs from different viewing distances. The light pink didn’t pop as much as I had hoped, but in order to stay consistent with my color palette, I took a look at type hierarchy instead. “Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures” grew in size, and I structured it into three lines because I liked the solidity of the stacked text. It occupied some of the negative space that had been bothering me in earlier iterations. I also increased the text size of the “Five Evenings, 2018/19”, but in order to avoid the red overshadowing the light pink of the title, I gave the large numbers a different text style to lessen the contrast. I ultimately kept the main information together at the base of the poster, where the abstract shapes guide the viewer’s eye as they enter the composition.
Final, 9/30
Getting a chance to have my poster critiqued by an individual heavily involved in the organization was helpful, but also threw in some new things to consider at a later stage in my process. It made me reassess my priorities in imagery, pointing out the lack of immediate context for this event. I tried to come up with some iterations that were more reflective of reading, learning, and community, but really struggled to stay evocative and not literal. In the two directly below, I chose vertical stripes to parallel the spines of books all lined up on a shelf, but although I liked the color palette on the top-right, the connection felt forced. The bottom two suffer from the opposite problem, as the poster literally includes the silhouette of a book laid open in front of the viewer. Although I understand the critique given on Thursday, I ended up returning to my original ideas in the belief that a poster can effectively recreate an experience without using images from it.
It was also interesting to note the different significance that Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures people had attached to the same information! My decision to push the author’s name forward as the most recognizable element won’t necessarily align with the views of others, and that’s okay as long as alternatives have been taken into account to. In my revision of my final iteration, I actually doubled down on this line of thinking by increasing the size of the type for the authors. Having returned to my original image, some things I wanted to analyze included the sense of tightness at the base of the previous poster. I reorganized the text on the page following a new 8-column grid, avoiding the awkwardness of balancing five text boxes horizontally by aligning them all vertically.
I ended up slightly altering the image itself by exposing the left-hand border in a concession to context; upon reexamining my options post-critique, I realized that this simple change made me think that I was seeing the binding wrap around the cover of a book. I think I could have benefitted on this project by exploring more options before setting my heart on this image, maybe by branching out into more illustrative routes, but I’ve also learned a lot by working with what I had. This color palette really spoke to the characteristics of the lecture series. The deeper shades of red and green evoke the gravitas of these established authors and their weighty contributions to culture and society, but the shades of pink feel youthful and joyous, true to the emotional experience of what it designed to be a celebration of literature and thought within a community.
