Poster
Project Overview:
This project's concept was inspired by banned book week, which is a national effort to bring about awareness of censorship in libraries and schools. The project pushed me to think deeper about the topic of banned books and stretched my comfort zone when using pre-assigned colors. Throughout the assignment, I compiled research and went through many stages of sketches and drawing before working on the computer outputs.
Research + Brainstorming:
Before I even started looking for inspiration for the poster itself, I began my looking for various banned books I had either personally read or knew something about. I did some research into why they were banned and dove a bit deeper into those reasons. Once I had settled on the book I would be using for my final design I went back and did additional research on the Hunger Games before writing the copy for the poster.
Sketches + Doodles:
At this stage, I used some of my research to give me inspiration for some of my poster topics. In the early stages, I was thinking I could make an event poster for the hypothetical Symposium that happens at the end of The Handmaid's Tale. I also tried to get inspired by big type and hand-lettered typography for some of my concepts..
Thumbnails:
Once I had a few ideas on paper I went ahead and chose my favorite three to further work out in my thumbnails. I chose the symposium/event style idea for The Handmaid's Tale, the wall idea for Perks of Being a Wallflower, and the hand-lettered concept for the Hunger Games. At this stage, I worked out the two stronger and more interesting ideas out of the three to further develop in the tight intermediate stage.
Tight Intermediates:
At the end of the tight intermediate stage, I realized my concept for The Handmaid's Tale would not work as well for my requirement of including the author, book title, and discussing banned book week on the poster. This made my decision to move forward with the design for The Hunger Games an easy one. I also knew I could have a lot of fun with the hand lettering if I did it just right.
Hand Final:
At this stage, I enlarged my concept and began to make some alterations to the design. I angled the body text along with the 'P' in "Spark" making it a bit more dramatic than before, adjusted some of the spacing and size of the letters, and added a subtle border with an important quote from the book.
First Computer Outputs:
During the first computer output, I continued to smooth out and work on the letters and their spacing so they did not feel so crowded. I added some shading as to the tone I thought my final poster would probably follow. I also wrote in the copy at this stage.
Color Studies:
In this project, we were assigned 4 colors that we were unaware of until around when I had reached the final hand stage of my design, and I would be given the flexibility to choose my own 5th color to add to the design. I tried many different color combinations with the 5th color and I had a lot of fun at this stage of the design. I feel lucky to have received the 4 colors I did because they went perfectly with the concept.
At this stage, as I was playing with color, I altered my design by adding a drop shadow effect to my illustrated type. By doing this it helped me add more dimension to my colors and it really made the lettering pop off the page. After testing all of the color combinations, I picked the red background as the one to pursue.
First Color Output + Revisions
This was my first color computer output. I was pretty happy with the colors and layout but there were a few things I would need to adjust before the final. "With A" stood out too much and I would change that to a warm color to make it stand out less. I altered the color of banned book week to make it show up a bit better and I also reformatted the text box to have a more structured and flag-like appearance.
Final Clean Version:
This is the final version and I am really happy with the result. Despite all of the issues I had found a printer that would actually print red (not orange or just a faded reddish color). I am really proud of this design and the bright primary colors of this design really push me out of my comfort zone and I had a lot of fun creating this and learning more about The Hunger Games and its banned book history.
Personal Revisions:
Once this project was complete, I went back a few months later to do additional revisions of my own. I no longer needed to be within the constraints of the assigned colors. I darkened up the red to make it more of a rich tone. I added an extra drop shadow to the lettering to give it more of a flickering blue flame feel. After evaluating the placement of the paragraph text, I rearranged it in a more simplistic and ordered manner and removed the text border to give more emphasis to the typography. With these changes, I am really proud of this project and it has become one of my favorites.
