Typographic Poster

Using a supplied font in three different pt sizes, I created 3 A3 posters. The first one was designed using just one font size (left), arranging all of the supplied information. I dislike this poster as it's quite boring and has no dimension to it. Also by all of the text being the same font size, it's difficult to navigate clients to the primary information. 

For the second poster (top right), I used two fonts. This is a much nicer effect as you can highlight the primary information and push back the 'less important'. I was highly influenced by the National Portrait Gallery posters, however these posters have portraits/images in the centre of the poster, thus I used the primary information typography to create almost an interesting shape to stand in as an image, while the secondary information is neatly positioned in the corners. 

For the third poster, again inspired by the National Portrait Gallery posters, I used 3 font sizes. This creates a much nicer aesthetic as it's more interesting to look at, but it also helps me as a designer to navigate the audience through the information. Due to this, I feel that the 3rd poster is my favourite, as I like the three levels of important information, and also the aesthetic and composition. 

Primary information:
What?
When?
Where?

Secondary information:
Who?

Tetriary information:
Travel information.

100 new uses for a brick

So this is my first project for University of East London (where I have achieved a full Vice-Chancellors Scholarship for Academic Excellence to study BA Graphic Design).
The brief set asked the students to illustrate 100 wacky uses for a brick, and then arrange these illustrations on an A2 black and white poster.


In order to respond to this brief, I began by creating a mind map, listing these 100 uses, and then creating a tiny, rough sketch to go next to each idea. I then decided to grab my sketch book and redraw each of these designs in more detail with better and more clear line works. These drawings are roughly the same size as an A5 sheet of paper, but of course some sizes vary. For these, I used a fine liner pen in various widths, as opposed to my initial sketches being created with an ordinary biro pen.


Using my very unreliable printer, I scanned in each of these drawings, page by page (there are approximately 5 illustrations per A4 page), before then opening each page in PhotoShop to increase the contrast of each; these were then re-saved and opened in Illustrator, allowing me to Live Trace the pages, to create clean, smooth vector drawings.
Using PhotoShop, I used the magic wand tool to remove the paper background from each Illustrator document, leaving the clean lines only.

As for the layout of the poster, I played around with a couple of ideas. My initial thought was to get creative and create almost an advent calendar, where each 'day' is a brick which folds open revealing a use of the brick concealed beneath. However we only had Friday to Friday to complete this whole project, with other classes on Wednesday and Thursday; meaning there was only 4 days to complete the illustrations and the poster.

Inspiration and playing with

orientation and layout.

I like this layout, however the illustrations

would have been too small to see. 

I opted for just a simple poster in the end. However I didn't want to just lay my illustrations out one by one in a 10 x 10 grid format, as I felt like that would be the obvious option for the majority of the students. I'm really into science, so when thinking of an interesting grid format, the periodic table came to mind with its categories, irregular shape and much more interesting layout.

As I used the periodic table as my inspiration for my layout this caused a couple of issues as there are not 100 elements/noble gasses within the periodic table, so it required me to rearrange the design, place some illustrations outside of this grid, dividing them with a simple line. As for the typography choice, and the overall design, I was inspired by Chanel as I appreciate the cleanliness, sophistication and simplicity of the branding. Considering the poster was required to be in a clean black and white colour scheme, I turned to the inspiration of Chanel, and also incorporated a thick black border with a solid white background, which is classic for the brand.

Overall I am quite happy with the design. I feel like it does look a little boring and not as impactive as I would have liked. However given the brief and the timescale, I feel that the outcome was successful and I am happy with my inspirational choices as I feel that it took the poster from being a simple 10 x 10 grid so something more hearty and irregular. I also rotated one on the illustrations 180 degrees, to create a decorative floral piece. 

Final Piece