Design Rational – Final

The purpose of this theatre poster is to advertise the date, time and the fact that this is a play. Secondly to that to promote the humours atmosphere attested to in the description and reviews of the play. The criteria for a successful theatre poster is to inform an audience quickly that there is a play occurring and advertise the date and time of said play. Also to promote the atmosphere of the play and be eye-catching in a sea of posters. There are five played that are being advertised for this festival so there would lots of posters in areas of advertisement so it needs to quickly catch the eye and quickly inform the fact that a fun play is going to happen.

This is done through visual hierarchy.  The date is bold as well as being placed within the balloon to indicate that this poster is advertising an event with a specific date and time. This is the most important information to convey quickly as if the person viewing the advertisement is interested in going to an event they will be drawn and quickly learn the other details which are secondarily eye catching in the visual hierarchy. The next text with the most visual weight is the title as it is the largest and then the smaller critic quotes lead the eye down the page around the balloon, to the smaller description on the bottom. Also the title with its pink underline adds a pop of colour to add to its importance in visual hierarchy. 

Also the addition to the ballon there is the doodles to add more visual intrigue and balance to the piece as well as conveying the stories of the play.

The choice of the balloon was to promote a fun feel without being too literal in the imagery. The cropping of the image causes it to be abstract which ads to its visual appeal. The bright colour pops out drawing the eye quickly in a sea of posters. Also the fact that is bright pink and a balloon promote the idea of fun and whimsy conveyed by the description of the play.

The choice of typeface, is to add to a feeling of humor without being over the top. This is a professional play and thus cannot have font that is too over the top. The font of the titles is a font that is easy to read while not looking too formal to add to the fun feel and not create an overly serious poster. The bold blocky font of the titles is both easy to read and more fun than a more traditional serif font.

The font in the quotes is a simple sans serif which is easy to read which is important to convey information in a poster. Who said the quote is not as important ae the content so that aspect is smaller to avoid too many words cluttering up the image.

The other lines of text are in the same font as each other to create some unison but have difference in size alignments and bold or italic font. This seridf font is more formal and ads to professionalism to the poster in information that is not as important to read quickly. This separates the block of text to emphasise that they have different information. But also to differentiate the practical information from the praising information.

All these aspects work together to make the poster both legible and eye catching to help it stand out and convey the vital information to the audience.

Design Rational

The purpose of this theatre poster is to advertise the date, time and the fact that this is a play. Secondly to that to promote the humours atmosphere attested to in the description and reviews of the play. The criteria for a successful theatre poster is to inform an audience quickly that there is a play occurring and advertise the date and time of said play. Also to promote the atmosphere of the play and be eye-catching in a sea of posters. There are five played that are being advertised for this festival so there would lots of posters in areas of advertisement so it needs to quickly catch the eye and quickly inform the fact that a fun play is going to happen.

This is done through visual hierarchy.  The date is the most bold as well as being placed within the balloon to indicate that this poster is advertising an event with a specific date and time. This is the most important information to convey quickly as if the person viewing the advertisement is interested in going to an event they will be drawn and quickly learn the other details which are secondarily eye catching in the visual hierarchy. The next text with the most visual weight is the title as it also quite lar and then the smaller critic quotes lead the eye down the page around the balloon, to the smaller description on the bottom.

The choice of the balloon was to promote a fun feel without being too literal in the imagery. The cropping of the image causes it to be abstract which ads to its visual appeal. The bright colour pops out drawing the eye quickly in a sea of posters. Also the fact that is bright pink and a balloon promote the idea of fun and whimsy conveyed by the description of the play.

The choice of typeface, is to add to a feeling of humor without being over the top. This is a professional play and thus cannot have font that is too over the top. The font of the titles is a font that is easy to read while not looking too formal to add to the fun feel and not create an overly serious poster. The font in the quotes is the same but Italic which is on line with a common theme of putting quotes in italics in other places. Who said the quote is not as important ae the content so that aspect is smaller to avoid too many words cluttering up the image.

The other lines of text are in the same font as each other to create some unison but have difference in size alignments and bold or italic font. This separates the block of text to emphasise that they have different information. But also to differentiate the practical information from the praising information.

All these aspects work together to make the poster both legible and eye catching to help it stand out and convey the vital information to the audience.

Project 3 In Progress

For this project I started out intending to take a bicycle image that was abstract and zoomed in on the metal wires of the wheels or incorporating the tire in some one. However in attempting this the image was too dark. The black bicycle tire had too much contrast upon the winter background in the images. I instead turned to the images of the balloon I had taken for par A of this project and choose the one that showed only the top of the balloon and then a blurred background. The image was intriguing to me, it reminded me of a sun on a horizon which i think played into the symbolic images of the play in the rising of the new relationship and perhaps the setting of the old in an abstract way.

I am suppose to include a logo for the theatre who puts on this play but not sure where to find it as of yet so I put in the word “logo” as a place-holder for where i’d like it to be. The words used are taken directly from the play summary from the outline for this project and from the website from the theatre itself.

I intended for the date and time to be most predominate both by placing it on the pink instead of the gray and by using a bold font with the most weight, I felt that by doing this that it emphasised what the poster was for – namely a play. And secondly the title, after we have established it is an event to drive home it is a play.

UPDATE

In learning I need to change the page orientation I came up with more designs ideas in sketch form:

Project 3: Part B

Project 3: Part A

Caption: IT

 Caption: Imperfect

Caption: Rounded

Caption: Knot

Caption: Horizon

Caption: Emergency

  Caption: Secure

Caption: Alert

Caption: Glowing

Caption: Crashed

 Caption: Mechanical

Caption: Rusted

Caption: Reflector

Design Processes

Design Processes

For this exercise I had a hard time deciding on what to do so I ended up doing a rough mind map just about my day and choosing a topic that was the most encompassing. Since the assignment was a personal process map I tried to identify a topic that was important to me now. That was university and being a student.

In doing these I found doing that there were a lot of aspects to university other than school such as being away from home, being for the first time independent and balancing school with other aspects of student life.

There is also a lot of pressure on students to strive and go to university under the assumption that only with substantial degrees will the student have financial/career stability later in life. In doing the 50 questions and the outside view design processes show that society pushes this fact. People are always asking why that major and if there is a career in that and such. And yet there is the oppositional view that you should do what you like and that in that you will be the most successful. These are interesting conflicting ideas in the mind of the university student when it comes to choosing where to go and what to do.

There are a lot of choices to be made in university that change the course of life and this came through in these design processes exercises. Whether one choose to do what they like or what makes the most money, whether one choose to go out all night or to stay in and study, and whether a student’s habits and outlook encourage or discourage the success of the student.

UPDATE 

After thinking more about the topic and what I want to do for the final poster, the university concept felt a bit played out. I started going back to my original mind map and looking at the other aspects of my daily life could have an interesting mind map associated. I started thinking of games, I am in a video game course currently and enjoy different games and aspects of gaming culture.

Mostly I play table top games and the many choices that are made in play play and character creation could make an interesting branching image going  of the aspects of branching storytelling from player choice. 

Expressive Text Compositions

Expressive Text

For this assignment I was interesting in looking at the different alignments of texts and how those individual tools change how we read the text. I think that my font, cooper black, wouldn’t be a text used often in paragraph composition and personally I would use it for titles, headings, and stand out words and not for entire paragraphs. However, I feel like the compositions did work and with adequate white space to counter the boldness of the font the composition can be quite elegant.

These are two that I didn’t use but still worked on and created in Adobe Illustrator. Both of these mixed centred text and left or right aligned text. I thought that mixing text forms created interesting forms and organic shapes on the page. I really liked the first and last sections and tried to highlight them in some of my designs. The one on the right has those first 3 unique lines which are centred like a poem. I felt that they were poetic and I liked this design but I thought the other two I made, and ultimately chose, had a stronger composition.

These are the two I ultimately chose to include in my final poster. I thought these designs were quite different from each other which showcased the versatility of the font. The left is my favourite; I like its classy look and the clean edges. I don’t mind the spacing since it aids in the readability of these otherwise bold bubbly text. With no page breaks the spacing allows it be legible. The other has the organic shapes of the other designs which I liked and the multiple line breaks add to its legibility.

Progressive Typography Process

Progressive Typography

For this assignment I did many sketches for several of the words. I tested most of them in Illustrator and tried other variations in Illustrator itself. I found that things looked different on Illustrator than how I thought it would and it didn’t have the effect I wanted to convey to represent the word.

Here is one I decided didn’t work as well in the digital image as I thought it would on the paper. It just looked like the  vowels were a different colour and not as if they were fading as I intended.

I feel like this instance was not as strong with the ones I chose to include in my final submission.

I had an idea for ‘migration’ of imitating the V shape birds make when they migrate south in the winter. I had done a mock up of my sketch but when I looked on the computer the negative space was too overwhelming; it felt too small with the canvas limitations so I decided to add more lines as if it was some sort of flock. However, the effect looked much more like a Christmas tree and not like a flock of birds so I decided to abandon the idea.

I found my font pretty easy and universal to work with. That’s not to say that there were no limitations but I felt that the restraints of the font dictated my ideas and its generic, rounded shape lended itself well to the sketches.The compression sketches were the hardest to make. The bubbliness of the font made it hard to get the letters close enough to look compressed but still legible.

In the end, I did elimination and repetition as I felt these were the strongest sets overall. However, they were not easy; the large amount of text in the repetition piece froze the program but in the end I got the effect I wanted in each of the final pieces.

A Brief History of Cooper Black

The font Cooper Black is a bold, black, old style serif font. The font was created it 1922 and was based on Cooper Old Style but differed in its overly bold weight. Cooper Old Style was created a few years earlier in 1919. It was designed by a man named Oswald Bruce Cooper. Incidentally he also designed Cooper Black, and its country of origin is the United States. The company that published Cooper Black was Barnhart Brothers and Spindler and it was on metal foundry. This font wasn’t especially well received and advertised as being ‘for far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers,’ and was dubbed “‘The Black Menace’ by its critics”. (caseyconnect). This font, however, has become popular since these comments were issued and has been used in many advertisement and branding campaigns.

Cooper Black has mostly been used in advertisements and in product logos due to its bold design. This font has been constantly popular from its origin through to the present and used in many different advertisements (not just in one company’s ad campaign). This font, although used constantly from its original release, is considered iconic of the 70s. This font is often used to get a retro 70s style or feel in a graphic design.  Some popular examples of this font in a logo or advertisement: Tootsie Roll, Garfield, T-Shirts, Easy Jet, and many more.

There are a few variants of this font: Cooper Hilite, Cooper Black Italic and Cooper Black Condensed. Cooper Hilite is the most different with its white outline inside the letters whereas the others are either just a reduction of leading or italicising of the letters. All of them have their charms and a place where they are used in particular design strategies.

References:

http://typedia.com/explore/typeface/cooper-black/

http://www.howdesign.com/how-design-blog/the-story-of-cooper-black/

http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2012/9/7/visual-history-of-cooper-black.html

http://caseyconnect.com/blog/2013/typography/cooper-black-the-far-sighted-font-for-near-sighted-readers/

http://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/7357/cooper-black

http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://d35fkdjhhgt99.cloudfront.net/static/renders/21/16872/800/1/547ae6c6/cooper-hilite.png&imgrefurl=http://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/7357/cooper-black&h=176&w=782&tbnid=9VkQ3LCg8ySnAM:&zoom=1&docid=hAISpKsQ7ErQ_M&ei=MjDAVLjSH4XIsQS4q4HIDw&tbm=isch&ved=0CC4QMygRMBE

http://blog.studiojubilee.com/post/42016068055/cooper-black

Nintendo Cover Art

One piece of print media that I came across in my everyday life was in the varied designs of the sticker art in my NES game collection. This is my favourite of the labels I have: Bart Simpons vs. The Space Mutants by Aklaim (1999).

I think this graphic is well done and is effective in doing what it was designed to do which is to sell games. The large graphic of Bart centred in the picture is definitely the first thing that draws your eyes. The use of yellow and other bright colours is effective both in brand promotion and making this image stand out in comparison to other games. The second thing that draws the eye is the logo in the spray painted bubble which is the title of the game. Then the rest of it is a highly colourful image with lots to look at. This makes it interesting to keep looking at whereas the others are more one dimensional.

These are 2 other NES games whose cartoon aesthetics I believe are more effective and eye catching for marketing them to tweens. The football game has a very realistic, almost photographic feel which is less ‘fun’ looking and is less appealing to its key demographic. The Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros. game art has a pixel aesthetic, which shows how the game actually looks, unlike the art on the other two games. This game, however, usually came with the console and wouldn’t have needed to be marketed separately. I think The Simpsons game cover is more effective in its marketing because it renders an image instead of showing graphics from the game. The Simpsons brand is better represented by this type of image rather than the 8-bit rendering.

There are three places where typography is used in this image. Firstly there is the company logos and required lines of text which are pretty standard for the medium of game sticker design. Its placement in a large blue, bright rectangle helps to integrate this text onto the sticker without it feeling out of place. In addition, the use of red text in both the Nintendo and Aklaim logo matches and has resonance with the red spray paint at the top of the composition. The typography in the logo has the font of the iconic Simpsons logo which is expected of a Simpsons licensed product. To me the ‘Bart vs. The’ is a standard video game dramatic text, and the ‘Space Mutants’  is reminiscent of old horror movies (sometimes spoofed in The Simpsons). That bold and horror look is effective in marketing the game as a space mutants game, something that viewers of the show would recognize from it.

The third place text is used is on the spine of the game (middle).

This is where I think the typography is less effective. It is not as legible as the others which is a huge detriment. The use of the same fonts is a nice touch but that blue shade does not allow for the ‘Space Mutants’ part to stand out like the text on other games of this type.