Creating the Poster!

Over the past 1-2 weeks I've been producing my Science Recruitment Poster. It's gone well - I've pretty much stuck to what I initially planned design wise but I've deviated and developed the colour scheme further, as what I chose was not too well thought out and when I applied it to my work it just didn't look right.

My initial chosen colour scheme

I'm sticking with the greyish black and the off white. They're both a few shades from being too over powering (e.g. a stark, bright white) and are easy on the eyes. I'm using the black for the silhouettes that build up the shape of the dress, and the off-white will form the background of the poster in order to "pop" the colours in front of it.

I did want to use mainly the pink for the surrounding silhouettes as I thought that would appeal more directly and stereotypically to girls, but when I applied this colour to my design I felt it lost some of its Pop Art quality. In my research I concluded that obviously, Pop Art contains bright colours, but that they were also colours of the rainbow - primary and secondary colours. The colours I have chosen above hint towards Tertiary colours.

http://theaudacityofcolor.com/2010/06/17/color-101-primary-secondary-and-tertiary-colors/

So I've decided to experiment with including more Primary/Secondary colours in my design, to see if it results in a stronger link to the Pop Art style. These colours are bright and eye catching and the fact that I've not used primarily pink will not mean the poster will appeal less to girls. I mean, there's a huge dress in the middle of the page?

I've developed my skills on Illustrator hugely. When I started this project I had absolutely no clue how to work the pen tool, and as a result had no confidence in drawing shapes in the program. I'd rely heavily on my graphics tablet, and as I'm no artist I struggled with producing shapes that actually looked like what they were supposed to be. Now, I'm more than happy using the tool and am able to confidently use it's features (specifically the Add/Convert anchor point) appropriately and quickly in order to produce what I can see in my mind on screen. I've also combined the use of my graphics tablet and tools like the Pen, and find that I personally produce much better and more realistic shapes when I utilise both.

Tools/techniques I've used most: Pen tool, eyedropper, manipulating strokes (e.g shapes of the corners), shape tools.

The basis of my chosen design is built up with silhouettes, so I've obviously had to create those. For this I've also found myself relying on the Pathfinder window to merge several shapes into one as well as using the Divide and Trim options to simulate gaps in each of my silhouettes (e.g. hole where the glass goes in a pair of glasses). Below are some of the shapes I've created.

I did look at some example fonts in my research and when I was developing my idea, but I'm still not decided on what I'm going to use. I've tried a few fonts but didn't think they sat well with the design, so I'm leaning towards designing my own. I want the font to be pop art-esque. 

My Pitch.

I presented my pitch to my group, and got some feedback. The overall response was positive and the group liked my idea. The main feedback I got was to refine the presentation further so my ideas were presented simply and without confusion.

I didn't receive any feedback on the proposed content of my poster, e.g. the tagline or the imagery, but was praised on the strength of my designs (the quality of my mock ups and my use of illustrator) and the way I have worked in order to come to each decision.

Developing my idea

Build the shape of a fashion item, e.g. a handbag or a dress, out of silhouettes of Scientific imagery (a planet, a magnifying glass, a DNA spiral etc.) to suggest the idea of everything being built out of things we know as "Science" as well as science being the "new black" - science is popular.  This poster shall be in the Pop Art design style. Below are some initial art work ideas.

The shapes I've drawn are examples of what the rest will look like - in a silhouette style in either black or a colour. Below is the dress I will be using as a guide - drawn on Illustrator. The silhouettes I create will fill this dress to represent the shape of it.

I was experimenting with what the background, behind the dress, would look like. I decided to get rid of the edge of the dress as keeping it would make it more than obvious that there was a dress on the poster and would withdraw from the "science" aspect. Instead I have chosen to expand the silhouettes around the shape of the dress, and will highlight the shape of it by using colour. The shapes that build the dress shall be in black, with the surrounding colours in one or two colours.

I've also made a decision to then frame this artwork with a more subtle background that contains further elements of Pop Art. For this I've taken inspiration from Roy Lichtenstein and his signature dots. (see below)

As I've decided to use colour as one of the main ways to identify the dress, I've chosen a strong combination of colours that contrast each other well. 

The creamy white colour will be used for the dots to create a neutral background, and will help 'pop' the other colours. The rest of the colours are not the brightest shades of each so the use of the creamy/white colour will help keep the poster bright and true to the pop art style. 

Choosing a relatable idea and taglines!

I was finding it really hard to develop my original idea in the style that I decided on, and didn't feel like it was going to work. I want to make a poster that is strongly orientated towards women, but didn't feel like all of the ideas I had were developed or thought about enough. I experimented a lot more, came up with a lot of designs, combined a few and adapted things here and there, but I think I've finally concluded on a specific idea that would work in a number of different layouts.

I want to make a poster that is specific to females, and I want to choose imagery that the majority of females can recognise and hopefully relate to as it's something that's important in their lives - specifically 16-18 year olds (my target audience). What stuck out to me was the theme "fashion", and a females appearance in general. A lot of 16-18 year old girls care heavily about what they look like, what their peers think of them and whether or not they are keeping up with current trends, and for a lot of them this can directly relate to whether they're "popular" or not, which is important to them.

Similarly, Science does not have a reputation as a "cool" or "fun" subject to study, and I want to change a females perspective of the subject by advertising it around something they are already interested in.

So, I've run with the fashion theme. I'm going to combine the two - fashion and science. One of the most difficult things I was trying to do was come up with a tagline, but with a theme to relate it to I came up with 3 in particular:

• "Whats in my Science bag?" - Reminds me of videos on Youtube "whats in my make up bag", provoked imagery in my head of "essentials to take to science class" (e.g. then imagery of "science stuff". 
• "Wear Science on your sleeve" - being proud of studying science, showing it off, openly discussing science, accepting science, being and making other people interested in science, science is positive.
• "Science is the new black" - science is popular, the next big thing, you should 'get in on it' like it's the newest iPhone, "everyone" is into science, in a way "following the crowd", people will be impressed if you study it. Heavily related to fashion, provokes imagery of clothing. 

My favourite is "Science is the new black". It puts the subject in a whole new light, and suggests the idea of popularity and it being the "next big thing" for a girl to study (and in fashion, wear). So I started to do drawings. I love the idea of silhouettes, and this is something I've developed off of previous ideas for this project. An initial idea I had was to catch girls attention with something like hair dye, and then encourage them to study science in order to find out what it's made of - "science is everything", "everything is here because of science". So I combined these two ideas. Build the shape of something recognisable (e.g. a handbag, a dress) out of science imagery, to suggest the idea of everything being built out of science as well as science being something thats popular.

I drew "sciencey" imagery in a silhouette style, and then drew shapes that I thought would be directly and recognisably related to fashion.

I then drew my first mock up of how I thought I could make the layout work. It's quite basic, image + text below. 

Early 20th Century Posters: Typography!

I've decided to create my poster in the Sci-Fi, early 20th century style, so I've been looking into the typography used on these posters.

Generally bold, sans serif fonts are used throughout. They are neither fancy nor hard to read and can be easily and evenly aligned in different ways - e.g. in a shape, justified alignment, diagonally, one word on top of another.

Typical fonts of the 20th Century Sci Fi poster style:

All are obviously very bold and would work well for a title/tagline on a poster.

Early 20th Century Posters: Colours!

1 - 2 - 3

4 - 5 - 6

I picked some existing Sci Fi movie posters to analyse the colours of, as I'm leaning towards using this design style in my own poster. 

There's yellow in every single one of these posters, just at different degrees of use. 2 of these posters also have very similar colour scheme - numbers 2 and 4 ("I married a monster from outer space" and "Mothra".) Red, black and yellow, with a off-white border. Red, black and yellow together are a good combination as they all contrast against each other very well. Red and black are bright and bold colours that catch attention.

Each colour that's used in the posters is used in quite a large, obvious block and nothing is coloured so that it appears subtle or not noticed as much. 

Existing "Recruitment" Posters!

I decided that since I'm going to be designing a poster that "recruits" people to study Science at A Level, I should look into existing posters that recruit people (for science, or other things like jobs). Some fall in the design styles I am looking into, some don't.

1   -    2    -    3

4   -    5    -    6

I really like the design styles of the majority of these poster - particularly 3, 4 & 5. Numbers 3 & 4 would fall into the early 20th century sci-fi moving style category, and this is mainly down to the fonts and colours used.

The main reason I looked into existing posters was to find out what information they have on them. The examples I've found are a mixture of job recruitment posters (e.g. army jobs) and then what I'm going to be designing - school club/subject recruitment.

The first common thing I noticed on these posters is that their target audience, or just the general person that is being targeted is written in the biggest letters. On no.2 we know for sure that the poster is aimed at girls because the biggest writing is GIRLS (and just the word itself is a huge clue). On the 1st poster, the word "YOU" is biggest piece of text, and although not the biggest aspect of the poster (the majority of it is an image), it's eye catching because we feel personally targeted by the poster ("who, me?"), even though the actual target audience (young males to join the army) may not actually be ourselves. With number 5, the word "YOUNG" is written in capitals, at the top of the poster in bigger letters than everything else, and this immediately identifies the target audience - if someone were to give this poster a fleeting glance, they'd understand whether it were aimed at them or not.

There seems to the be varying degrees of information on these posters. The poster I'm taking most note of though is number 5, as it fits within the category I'm aiming towards - getting someone to join a club/study a subject. It doesn't have any text that isn't necessary, and uses the tagline as the main, convincing line to get someone to join the club - straight to the point, links to the target audience straight away and no other text needed. This means the poster accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do and is understood by the appropriate people in a very simple way.

Other obvious things I noticed were:

• Imagery related to the subject (e.g. "join chefs club", pictures of a chefs hat, knifes and forks etc)
• Convincing, strong language "fight", "need YOU", get this job "NOW".
• Specific colours to enhance meaning - Poster 2: Red text, the important word in black - black on red is a strong, in a way "serious" combination. In generally heavily contrasting colours for background/text. 
• Varying degrees of info. To relate this to my project, I could use just one line that basically says "study science" or explain in some detail why someone should - should find a balance between eye catching, not convincing enough, or too boring. 

Research: Victoriana!

As a quick summary, the word Victoriana is used to describe design, furniture/fashion etc that was designed in, or is designed to represent the Victorian time period (1837 - 1901) and remind people of the general style that was of that period - e.g. the dresses, scrolls tainted with ink in calligraphic writing and smartly dressed men in top hats. info from

The Victoriana design style is very similar to Steampunk, just with a less metallic/industrial/steam engines/robotic look etc. Here are some examples I found on http://designspiration.net/tag/victorian.

Both of these examples are very text heavy and very sparse with their colouring  In the Victorian era there were no colour photographs or film, so in this way these designs represent that and what someone my age may think of and relate to with the Victorian era.

The text features a lot of serifs, and some is in a "medieval" style. The large "ears" off of the N and D in the 2nd example portray a fancy, elegant and typical "victorian" look.

The alignment and shape of the text is different in both. In the first example it is designed so it is displayed as a banner - in Illustrator it would be positioned along a path - and it is evenly spaced to create a mirrored effect, which again makes the design look neat and elegant (combined with the swirls and flowers coming off of the banner design). In the 2nd example, the text is aligned in a "justified" style so each edge of each line is in line, so create a column of text - this is commonly used in newspapers. And then within this there is use of, what it is called in Photoshop, Text Warping, combined with the justified alignment and a bit of experimenting. You can see on the left how the words "Todays specials" are warped, and the word "Bright" has been warped to fill the gap, with the rest of the text following to create even spacing and alignment.

I did some more research into Victoriana design and found some advertisement posters from that time. To the left is an advertisement by Brooke's Soap, advertising their product. The first thing I notice is the lack of saturated colour and the large image that takes up most of the page. The image of the woman and the small child looks relatively realistic, and is framed by a description of the product and a title. No part of the woman and child that are featured is covered in text, so they are clear to see and from this the target audience is clear - Mothers. The creamy white border frames the advertisement, with a quote and some info at the very bottom in a black that contrasts it.

The image of the mother and child is of an obvious "old" style photograph that is not in colour. Based on the images I've already analysed I would say that this is a general thing in a lot of Victoriana design. Its not necessarily all grey, black and white, but I haven't seen many works that contain really bright colouring - compared to a style like Pop Art.

Main things I noticed about Victoriana

• Typography is very prominent, and the majority of fonts contain Serifs and have "ears" (e.g. the large swirls off of the 'N' in the 2nd example. There seems to be a running theme in this style of typography.
• There seems to be a theme of stacking words one on top of the other, so it reads in a column.
• Colours are not intense, and borders (particularly of lighter, creamy-white colours) are common to frame the image. The borders provide a sense of elegance which is true of the Victorian era and provide a place for other information to be written in. 
• Real images of people - have not seen many "cartoon"/"animated" style images.
• A lot of text means generally there's quite a lot of information on posters.
• Logos are quite large and obvious (e.g. "brooke's soap")

Research: Steampunk Text!

When I was researching Steampunk, very few of the images that showed up in my search had text featuring on them. If I'm going to create a poster that tries to recruit people to join something, there's quite a high chance it's going to need to feature some text, so I did some research on Steampunk text/fonts. This is what I found:

Like the Steampunk images I found, there seems to be varying degrees of the style. Number 2 features less mechanical imagery than say, number 4 or 3, but all fit within the Steampunk genre. Image number one has a lot of imagery that you'd find in an industrial setting, but then also has a Victorian hat sat on top of  one of the letters.

These fonts seem like they'd be difficult to read if they were used in a long sentence, and would be better used as titles. Here are other fonts I found that could be better for longer stretches of text.

Main things I noticed:

• Using a combination of images to build the shape of a letter
• Victorian style text that features industrial colours (greys, blacks, golds) and patterns (coils, cogs, steam)
• Slight use of Serifs with references the Victorian influence, but not always necessary (particularly in the more complex "title" style fonts I initially looked at)
• Varying degrees of complexity

Research: Steampunk!

A quote I found online explains Steampunk well..

"a touch of technology with a pinch of antiquity and perhaps a dash of the macabre. There is humanity...and even a bit of social rebellion and transgression."

Kris Kuksi

http://www.moreintelligentlife.co.uk/content/lifestyle/gary-moskowitz/steampunk

Firstly I wanted to find out a bit about where the Steampunk genre originated from. What I discovered was that it's a sub-genre of science fiction that merges with the design style of the victorian era, and was inspired by novels about steam-powered engines in a romantic in a victorian-style setting by writers such as H.G Wells and Jules Verne. The genre conveys a sense of both romance and slight horror in a fantasy world of clockwork and steam engines, and is "what the past would have looked like if the future had happened sooner". 

Examples of Steampunk:

 

The character featured in the example on the right is wearing quite smart clothing, but has been adapted to feature the "mechanical" elements of Steampunk. His hat has been modified to feature the industrial elements of the genre as well as the side of his skull too. He's a mixture of the smartness of a Victorian outfit and the industrial, metallic style of a technological, fantasy world. The modifications to the Victorian outfit on the left is much more extreme than the reasonably subtle cogs on the top hat, but shows the variations of Steampunk and the adaptability of the style. 

Both images have a specific colour scheme that do not contain any colours that particularly stand out. Each contains different shades of the same colour - The right ranging from a dark to a very light blue, and the left a range of shades of gold. This technique has created a realistic look of shading and in particularly on the left hand side has resulted in a metallic effect. The use of a lighter shade against a background of the same colour (very light blue against a much darker shade) has created a "smoke" effect, and this is used in the left hand image too. There's quite a heavy use of black and this highlights the elements of the design that are of a lighter colour.

This example of Steampunk separates what the two previous have combined - mechanics and people. The people feature are in regular clothes - significant to the Victorian era but in a style that suggests they are people that are less well off - in a location that resembles somewhere such as London. The "robot" featured takes up the majority of the image and is the main focus as well as of the darkest colour - a greyish/metallic black. 

Summary of main design aspects:

• One main colour used in a variety of shades
• Heavy use of dark shades, predominantly black
• Combines people with mechanical aspects - e.g. add cogs to their arms to make them look robotic
• OR completely separates the two and almost turns them against each other (see above)
• Detailed shading, things look more realistic than they would in a Pop Art style
• Varying degrees of the "victorian" element show through. I would argue that out of the two images at the top of this point, the one on the left is less recognisable as Victorian.

Research: Sci-fi Movie Posters!

Found a good site displaying some 1930's Movie Posters - they're in Swedish, though, and not all are of the Sci-fi genre.
http://50watts.com/20-Swedish-Posters-for-1930s-Hollywood

There's also a lot more on here:
http://wheredangerlives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/50-greatest-classic-sci-fi-poster.html

I really like the two above, and they both fit the Sci-fi genre the most out of that webpage. The very first thing I noticed were the colours - similar to Pop Art it is limited to only a few, but in contrast blacks are used quite predominately rather than as an outline.

They both have thick borders that highlight the poster by using a contrasting colour (off white on black) and both have a large image that takes up the majority of the page. 

I haven't seen any posters so far that feature a Serif font, so I think this is representative of the Sci Fi genre - it's not really a "fancy" genre, so serifed fonts wouldn't really represent this very well. Sans-serif fonts come across bolder and easier to read, so work better in this case. 

Another style I've noticed is the way some of the text is aligned, especially the tag lines and lists of actor names. You can see this on the "not of this earth" poster - the tag line has the text aligned to the left but the words themselves are stacked one above the other, but it all still reads together and looks like a little group of text. This is also on the "Tobor The Great" poster, on the bottom left and right for the actor/crew information. 

There also seems to be a "section" on each poster that is dedicated for information, and for 3 out of 4 of the posters above there is actually a box of a different colour at the top or bottom that contains it. This seems to separate it from the poster and make sure it stands out so people don't miss the information, and makes it easy to read so it doesn't clash with the rest of the imagery. 

Research: Pop Art!

The first thing I saw when I googled pop art was:

"Pop Art was the art of popular culture. It was the visual art movement that characterised a sense of optimism during the post war consumer boom of the 1950's and 1960's."

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/pop_art.htm

The two most common names I came across when searching for pop art were Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Andy Warhol in particular is someone named quite often as someone who "personified" Pop Art. He took images of popular things or people - such as a can of soup, or Marilyn Monroe - and turned it into a piece of art. With his famous "Marilyn" piece he used a variety of bold colours to strip the image of it's initial meaning (e.g. An image of Marilyn Monroe is important because of who she is). He did this because he felt things lost their meaning when they were made "popular". So, by using the same sorts of colours on all of his art and by making it all the same size etc he would make every piece of art he did have the same amount of meaning - one isn't better than the other purely based on what its of. 

Roy Lichtenstein is another famous Pop Artist. He focused more on the "comic strip" style, and his work is very consistent. It all features bold, black outlines and uses the "halftone" technique to fill blocks of colour. The halftone technique is a series of dots placed relatively closely together to fill up a space, and then when viewed from a distance that space will appear some-what one solid colour.

Left column by Roy Lichtenstein, middle and right column by Andy Warhol

Main things I noticed about the Pop Art Style:

• Bright, bold, contrasting colours. All of the colours used in the collage above contrast and stand out on their own, and no text (e.g. the 'Campbells' logo and 'Tomato Soup') is illegible. 
• Combination of around 3 colours in one piece, just used as different shades. Even though all of the colours are bold the art isn't hard to look at as there are only a few many colours (e.g. blue, red, white) and different shades of each are used to build the picture. 
• Blocks of colour - not really any shading, but blocks of black are used to represent it. You can see this in the hair of the woman on the phone (by Roy Lichtenstein, top left). The blocks of black are placed where there would actually be an effect of a shadow in a photo.
• Main background is a solid colour - The 'Campbells Soup' piece (Andy Warhol) has a blue background, but that blue is still featured within the can of soup itself. Whereas the Cow piece (by Andy Warhol also), has a bright yellow background that totally contrasts the main image of cow that is a red/pink shade. 
• Thick black outlines that combined with the solid blocks of colour give the art a 'cartoon' look. 

When I first saw that one of the design styles we needed to research was Pop Art, I knew where I was going to look first. I have a book called "Retro Graphic Design - Pocket Essentials" that contains all sorts of information on graphic design styles in a timeline style - from the 1880's to 1989, and one of the styles it covers is Pop Art.

Page 190, "Retro Graphic Design - Pocket Essentials"

The book talks about how Pop Art started out with collages in the Dada style - cut up images and existing advertisements arranged together to create photomontages - but then expanded into what we know and recognise as Pop Art today.

Early Pop Art by Richard Hamilton & Dada Art by Raoul Housmann

The article I found in the book 'Retro Graphic Design' talks about common fonts in Pop Art, these include:

Marquee Flash

Revue

Capone Light

Rockwell Extra Bold

Dreamland

Summary of the Brief AF102

Module AF102 - Science Department Recruitment Poster

The Task

• Design and produce a poster that helps to recruit students to study A Level science courses. 
• There's currently a push towards getting more girls to study sciences at A Level, so there is the option of considering this in the design.

Requirements

• Design at least one poster
• The poster should promote all 3 sciences (Chemistry, Physics and Biology) or should focus on one in particular. 
• Vector based, so it can be blown up/shrunk to any size. Will be printed at a A1 size
• Designed using Adobe Illustrator
• Based on an existing visual style - Steampunk, Victoriana, Pop Art, Early 20th Century Sci-Fi movie posters, or book cover art.
• Colours, typography  and graphic style must be true to the visual style chosen.
• Have a suitable slogan that links the design to the branch of science chosen to be promoted. 

I will also run this blog, updating it with any research that I have conducted (e.g. on existing visual styles), software techniques (both my own and existing artwork I am analysing), my development on the project, as well as feedback I get (from presentations, discussion with peers etc) and the changes I am going to make to my design based on it (and why).

Alongside my blog I will also keep a sketchbook that documents my ideas and how they develop throughout the project. The sketchbook will also contain experiments on colour, typography, drawing style and proofing.

The research I conduct and the ideas I develop on both my blog and in my sketchbook will help me put together a pitch. The pitch will present my ideas in the form of a proposal and will show what I intend to be my final design. I will receive feedback on make changes to my work depending on it.

At the end of the project I will submit:

• High quality .PDF of the final version of my poster.
• Working files from Illustrator (in .AI format)
• A pitch presentation
• This blog with its address
• Sketchbook