We dissected the design of these pre existing posters which inspired our choice of composition, font (which we found an alternative to the commonly used comic sans – ‘Primer’) and colour.
Louise and I designed the poster on Indesign. It worked really well having two people looking at the design simultaneously and meant we questioned the design choices more. Below are some screenshots to show our process.
You can see us formulating our composition before moving onto colour palettes.
Rachel, Zainab and Raph made our digital “clip-art style” illustrations on illustrator to go alongside our negative, traumatic alphabet. We wanted to make the design subtle so at a glance it looked just like all these other posters but on further inspection our message was revealed. Below are a few of my favourite illustrations done by Rachel.
These illustrations were then sent to me and I worked them into the poster. I had to think about sizing and making sure there was a visual consistency between the images. We had previously talked about the colours used so there wouldn’t be too much clashing between the text boxes and the images on top. I had to play around with angling some of the pictures and we previously identified how they extend out of the box. I had to make sure this was all balanced. It was so impressive how we all came together to produce this. I think we were all frustrated to stay with in the conceptual idea generating stage and just wanted to start making. Everything pulled their weight, having individual roles and we designed the poster really efficiently in my opinion. I don’t really have any illustrating skill so it was amazing to have group members who were really on it whilst having Louise around to keep an eye of the poster design with me. Below is our final outcome:
We got this printed the next day on the A1 printer. The evening before, Louise had sent a number of emails to schools around Kingston to see if we could use a classroom wall to photograph a picture with our poster in it to contextualise it. We thought this would be such an effective way to communicate our message and wanted to show how the design meant it would fit right into a classroom environment and how you wouldn’t question it. We thought we could try and recreate a classroom setting in a studio but we thought how the authenticity of a real classroom would really push the outcome. After running round the local schools, poster and camera in hand, we were lucky enough that a member of staff at St Johns C of E primary school let us use one of their classroom walls during break time.
We managed to install our final A1 poster in a local primary school on a classroom wall with all the other posters and classroom furniture to emphasise this realisation of the disruption of an accepted order.
I was really proud of what we managed to do especially after having multiple of our ideas shut down before reaching our outcome. I personally find it hard to assess what we would do differently. I think we had to go through these failed ideas as part of a process. We ended working really hard to produce an outcome which was pushed by the length of time we had.
If we were on this train of thought at an earlier stage, we would have been able to develop it further and perhaps draw more commonality between the words chosen. We had to think hard about each individual word obviously being limited by the starting letter and “a is for…” format, and whether it helped or hindered our message.
Cameron Aitken Graphic Design 