Promotional Materials For Events
For my current project I’m working on the promotional design for a contest to create the poster for the Annual Juried Student Art Show at Oneonta (more to come). I want to pay special consideration to the audience which is mainly students and faculty, but also to other members of the community. Upon analyzing past posters, I found many of them to be fairly traditional and conservative with the exception of the most recent one created for 2014. The poster is meant to represent the art department here at SUNY Oneonta and the art students, so I would love to create something unique and unconventional. The mind map I created focused mainly on what qualities distinguishes an art student and the first things that came to mind were characteristics like experimental, quirky, rebellious, hopeful, fearless, and profound. It also dawned on me that students of art are often exhibit delicate dichotomies. Our practice is steeped in traditional techniques and is certainly not lacking in rich history, yet we all strive to bring new and unexpected creations into existence using these same basic foundations. We take the most immaterial thoughts and ideas and do our best to make them tangible and relevant; to create an engaging experience for the viewer rather than settling for a passive glance.
After putting all this thought in, I decided to create a hand-drawn design of a male covering his face, with an explosion of ideas and images coming through his fingers and in place of his head. I plan on scanning the drawing and further manipulating it digitally. My thinking is that art students are similar to thoughts. We are an unfinished product, continually being developed and perfected. The male is covering his face because as artists, we are putting a piece of ourselves up for display when showing our work to others. This can often be intimidating, but this factor still cannot conceal the passion and enthusiasm that naturally pour forth from us as creative people.
As for inspiration, these are three posters I was drawn to. They were used for the bands The Black Keys and Mogwai, and for an event called the Blackfly Ball. I noticed I am drawn to posters with a lot of movement and detail. This may be a bit counter-intuitive, considering that poster design is often simply designed to be impactful, but something about a lot of detail really captures my interest and makes me want to read all the information carefully. I love art and design that appeals to our sense of wonder, thus i’m drawn to styles that convey all that is magical and mysterious.
Above the the progress I’ve made so far!. I started out with the hand-drawing, then made the image a vector and added color. I was so grateful to find out that my poster is now one of three in the running for our annual juried student show. After receiving suggestions from our art director I made a few changes. We discussed the problem of the rather abrupt line that delineates the man/creature’s torso on the bottom (which is something that also troubled me as I was designing). We also discussed perhaps altering the type so that the text on the top wasn’t as plain and so that the title of the poster wasn’t split between the top and the bottom. I tried to resolve these minor issues by adding the drips to the torso and by placing the entire title on he top in a curved form. I am pleased with these changes and I am so happy to hear the opinions of others in order to improve my designs. I am also working on a landscape oriented version of this poster with more of an emphasis on typography, but I personally like the traditional orientation for this design.