Poster Series Project
For this project, the assignment was to create a series of 3 posters for 3 events within an arts festival. In addition to learning to use a grid, balance text / illustrations / negative space, and communicating the event information, the biggest restriction of these posters is that we could only use 3 hues across the posters. I created my posters for a fictional 412 Night Market in Squirrel Hill, based off of a traditional Taiwanese Night Market.
Brainstorming
For my event, I brainstormed multiple ideas, including a music festival and food festival, which are two of my biggest interests. I quickly decided to do a food festival instead because I was more drawn to the potential illustrations and graphic elements I could do for this type of event. I came up with multiple ideas, including a desserts festival, Asian food festival, and Taiwanese food festival, but ultimately chose to do a Taiwanese Night Market, which is a cultural event featuring food and drinks that takes place every night in multiple locations around Taiwan. Anywhere from ten to hundreds of vendors will gather, each selling their own food, snack, or drink. My Taiwanese heritage is a large part of my identity, and so once I thought of it, I knew this is what I wanted to do.
To gain inspiration, I looked into the 626 Night Market, which is a Taiwanese night market inspired event held in the Bay Area and Southern California, as well as looked through images from traditional ones. Using the Pittsburgh area code, I named my event 412 Night Market because I wanted to have it in Pittsburgh. I chose to have it happen in Squirrel Hill because there are frequently cultural events there, and chose to have it over the summer. I decided to have my three posters each feature a different type of food available at the event: a main dish, a dessert, and a drink. I started by listing out my favorite Taiwanese foods, and from those I chose those that I felt were most iconic and representative of the culture. I also considered their colors, and how simple/complicated they were. I knew I wanted to have colorful posters that reflected the vibrancy of the event, and I wanted to challenge myself on the illustrations. In the end for the main dish, dessert, and drink, I chose beef noodle soup, fruit shaved ice, and boba tea respectively, then started looking up pictures for inspiration.
Looking at the pictures I was using for food, the colors became pretty clear: red, yellow-orange, and green. I created my color palette accordingly:
Sketching (Round 1)
I started with a few sketches in my sketchbook of different layouts for the posters. At first I wanted each poster to feature consistent text layouts, but with different positions on the poster, so I played with different positions of the text on the poster.
Digital Illustrations
After settling on my ideas, I first focused on my illustrations of each food. While it wasn’t the main focus of this project, I wanted to take this opportunity to create detailed digital illustrations, which I had always wanted to try but never had had a reason to do so. I was excited for this opportunity to play with the shapes and colors, and used a Wacom tablet and pen in Illustrator to create the following illustrations of each food.
Shaved Ice:
This was the first illustration I did, and I used the picture reference from above. I wanted to highlight the different tints and shades of the ice and each fruit, and used varying transparencies to help me create dimension. For each big shape (such as the ice cream on top), I used a semi transparent darker shade to create a shadow and a semi transparent tint to create a highlight on the base color. My focus for this illustration was creating identifiable fruits, using their key characteristics such as the white centers of the strawberries and the seeds of the kiwi. At the end I went back and added accents to each shape using full opacity lines in corresponding colors.
Beef Noodle Soup:
This illustration was the hardest for me in terms of color and trying to stay within my 3 color palette. Instead of using a direct reference, I wanted to the bowl to be at the same angle as the shaved ice’s bowl, so I used the pictures I found as references for each individual part instead. The feature I focused on capturing was the different layers of noodles: some way at the bottom of the bowl, some right under the surface of the soup, and some above. I used varying transparencies to capture that effect. For the vegetables in the bowl, it was easy to use the green color from the kiwi, but the hardest part was finding the right color for the meat and the soup. Using the color window, I eventually found a shade of red. Overall I was happy with it, but struggled with how to make the meat look more realistic.
Boba Tea:
This illustration was the one I did last because I knew it would be most challenging for me. I had a utensil in each illustration, so that they looked like they were in the middle of being eaten, but for this poster I chose to hand a hand holding the cup. Illustrating the hand was the most difficult part of all of the initial illustrations I did. Using the same color and layering techniques as I had with the previous two illustrations, I made each individual fruit floating in the tea and the boba at the bottom. At the very end, I layered a semi-transparent yellow layer over the entire cup so that it would look like tea. Because of time I was unable to complete the details of the hand and had planned to come back and finish it, but ultimately decided to leave it as is to let the actually food stand out.
First Digital Posters
After having initial illustrations, I wanted to quickly put together a few posters to see how everything was looking. I started by choosing a font, playing with different sans serifs ones until I decided on the one I liked best and felt best conveyed the lively and exciting personality of the event. I quickly typed up the information I knew (the title, date, and location) and moved on to creating initial posters.
I wanted the three posters to have different colored backgrounds, each one of the main colors from my color scheme. I chose to pair each illustration with the background color that was least prominent in the illustration, and placed the text in the corner of the direction of the poster that had the most negative space. The colors of the text were the respective shades of the background color, and I decided to layer the event title with white and a tint of the color to create more contrast and visual hierarchy, as well as mimic the shadows and highlights in the illustrations.
Sketching (Round 2)
While I was overall pretty happy with the illustrations and colors I had chosen, I felt that the layouts of the posters were a bit simplistic because I hadn’t put as much thought into them yet. I didn’t like how stuck the text felt all in one clump in each poster, and wanted to split up the text to create more movement and interest. I went back to my sketchbook, to quickly sketch a few more complicated layouts with the text:
Second Digital Posters
With my new sketches, I created more posters. This time I laid out a grid for each posters beforehand, and indicated different placements of different aspects. I used the same grid for each poster, with a set margin on all 4 sides, then a 10 x 5 evenly split grid in the center of the poster.
I then laid out where I wanted different aspects to go with boxes.
After putting in all of the illustrations and text I realized I had misjudged the dimensions of the event title, but more importantly, when laying out the posters failed to consider the different amounts of negative space created by the different shapes of the illustrations. Because of this, I feel like the resulting posters looked a bit off, but I couldn’t quite figure out exactly what was off.
Keeping the overall layout and grid, I made a few adjustments to the posters. My least favorite part of the poster was the rectangle of color at the bottom, but I still wanted to have the darker color on the background. I tried to make the shape to look more integrated with the poster by changing it to match the shapes of the illustrations. I also made a few adjustments to the text, changing the alignments and repositioning them slightly. I wasn’t completely satisfied with what the spacing of the text, but because of lack of time printed the posters I had (below) for interim critiques.
Interim Critique
The feedback I received from the class was pretty unanimous: there was too much text and it looked dense, there could be more contrast between the background and text on the third poster, and I should reconsider the right alignment of text. I definitely agreed with all of this feedback, especially about the text. The first and quickest adjustment I made was just to shorten the paragraph about the event, and after typing it out realized the lines were all almost the same length, so I used a justified alignment to have them fit in a box. The lack of contrast between the text and background of the third poster was definitely challenging for me as a I was designing it, and I wasn’t too sure on how to make the text darker without having it turn brown. I had already lightened the background, and as I kept trying to create more contrast, realized I started to stray from the original hue I had chosen, and had incorporated a more orange color than the original yellow orange I had chosen.
One comment from Julia that I realized I needed to consider was how to make my posters look like event posters, and she suggested that we do that by emphasizing the event info, such as the date, time, and location. She mentioned that having that clump of information was what made a poster look like an event poster, and that was definitely I needed to change about my poster. Making a few adjustments, I brought two different sets of posters to class on Thursday for our work session:
I had rearranged the text, but I wasn’t totally in love with how it looked overall, so I tried a variation with a different slash of color in the background with white text over it:
For this second set, I started playing with the yellow orange poster’s colors, making the text the exact hue I had chosen and making the background a tint of it. This made everything overall very light, and I didn’t like how it looked at all. It also made this poster stick out oddly amongst my series. Choosing the yellow-orange hue I had, I struggled the most with this third poster’s colors.
In Class Feedback
In class I was able to get some very helpful advice from Julia about some of the things I had been struggling with. The first thing I asked was about the right alignment, and she suggested I go back to my grid, and use a grid line to left align my text to avoid the right align. This definitely reminded me that I needed to redo my grid after I had moved things around so much.
I also asked about the yellow orange poster’s color, and she taught me to check the saturation of my swatches by changing the color mode. This totally changed how I was looking at my colors, and because of this I was able to make my yellow orange darker without going immediately to brown, as well as create more similarity in the shades of the backgrounds across all the posters. She mentioned that I could try having lighter backgrounds to help the posters feel less “full” while also creating more similarity in the colors’ shades.
The last piece of advice which was the most helpful for me because I was starting to get caught up in what I had already done, was to simply decompose and reconstruct the posters around my illustration. I was pretty set on my illustrations, so I made a new grid based off of where I wanted to have the illustration, then arranged the words around it based off of the grid. I took all of this and got back to work on my posters.
The first thing I did was adjust the colors of the backgrounds and deconstruct my posters. After adjusting the saturations and tints of each hue, I then went through all of the illustrations to make sure that I was only using 1 of my 3 chosen colors in them. I made sure all of the hues matched, and were all about the same in terms of saturation and light/darkness so that the posters didn’t feel disjointed. I also changed some of the tints/shades in the illustrations to be the same across all of them, such as using the same tint of green for the kiwis, limes, and bok choy in the first, second, and third posters respectively to create a more clear color unity across them. One piece of feedback I had gotten from interim critique was that someone had asked if I could be using all of the colors I had. With the exception of the orange, they were all shades and tints of the same three hues, but I wanted this to be more apparent to clearly these 3 posters together as a series for one event.
I definitely struggled with finding the right grid so that I could fit the right aligned text along the same grid line, while leaving enough room between the text and illustration. I wanted to keep my illustrations close to the size I had them at, but tried a variation of things to make the text work better, including rearranging the title and information. The adjustment that I made and liked the most was the way the title was arranged. The size of “night market” was the same as before, but I felt that this made the title more cohesive as “412 Night Market” rather than “Night Market” being a description or an afterthought. I wasn’t making huge changes, but I felt that each one, depending on which grid lines I followed and small details like the space between the text and illustration, made a significant difference:
Looking at all of these options, what really stood out to me was the weird space next to “night” in the title because everything else seemed to fit into nice rectangles. I made “market” slightly smaller and readjusted it, resulting in the title I used for the rest of the posters. I chose to use the grid and layout for the middle poster of the second row above, but bring the white box back to the front, and used this grid laid out the rest of the posters. I focused first on laying out the illustrations and text, then added the graphic elements, and lastly finalizing it with the new lighter, background colors.
I then did another iteration with stacked text, and these 2 sets of posters are the ones I submitted to the feedback channel on Slack to receive further feedback.
While I liked the stacked text versions for the red and yellow posters, I couldn’t get the text to fit in one chunk in the green one, and splitting it up make it look uneven. I struggled a lot with how to format the date/time/location/ticket information so that it conveyed everything it needed to convey but fit into the spaces of my poster, while looking like an event poster’s block of information. The green poster was the hardest because of the way the title worked with the slant of color, giving me less space for the information.
Slack Feedback
Based off of the feedback I got from Robert, I decided to go with the stacked text because it’s easier to read. Based off this, I decided to slightly alter the information in the text to make it short & easy to read, while still conveying all of the information I needed it to. I kept the date and time format, while changing the location to be the intersection of Forbes & Murray, allowing me to take out the “Squirrel Hill, PA” line which felt unnecessary to people who live in Pittsburgh and know where Forbes & Murray are. Doing this, I was able to condense all of text, resulting in the format of my final posters. I felt that this final format using the stacked text helped to make my posters look most like event posters, which is something I wanted to focus on with this project. I also made a few smaller adjustments suggested by Robert, such as just using left aligned text instead of justified for the body text, and shifting the bowl in the yellow poster up slightly to reduce the tension cause by the shapes’ intersections.
Final Posters
Reflection
My poster series were the last to be discussed during final critiques and we were running out of time, so I didn’t get a lot of feedback, but based off of the sticky notes I felt that my posters were well received overall. A lot of people felt that I had good craftsmanship and were easily readable as event posters, which I was happy about because these were two areas that I had focused on with the colors in my illustrations, the grid/overall layout, and the arrangement and content of my text. I was really happy especially with how the colors came across, and how I was able to use shades/tints of only 3 hues to create colorful and bright illustrations.
Overall, I’m happy that people really liked my illustrations, but I really enjoyed seeing everyone else’s posters because many people were able to clearly communicate their ideas through very simple illustrations, whether it was a line drawing or stacked shapes. Early on in preparing for this project, we had done the quick illustration exercise to see how we could communicate ideas as minimally as possible, which is something I would like to experiment more with in our next project. I would be interested in designing illustrations that convey a message without being extremely detailed and literal.
In conclusion, I learned how very important it is to have a strong grid and use it, because strong columns helped my text placement to look intentional and well organized with the left alignment. It also helped me to place my illustrations and text elements with each other in slightly different layouts between the posters while still reading as a series. I enjoyed this project and am proud of the posters I designed. I’m really looking forward to our next one!
