Week 1 (3/1–3/5)
The first week started off with exercises in type hierarchy based on line spacing, stroke weights, and shifting. This was a similar process to the poster project I’ve done in Communications Design Fundamentals, type specimen poster, so getting started was relatively straightforward.
The poster I chose for this project is for online WT Summer Camp. The poster contains information about the date, content, and instructor for each weekly camp as well as pricing and where to sign up.
Because each exercise had a lot of restrictions in terms of what we can change, clarity in the hierarchy was not very easy to achieve. I found the stroke weight exercise to be most effective in highlighting and separating the information because the thicker weights visually attract the most attention, especially without any color. The most difficult one for me was the shifting tabs exercise, I found it harder to separate the many levels of information without any line spacing.
For the second set of exercises, there was a combination of elements we could change, and I was able to organize the information while also highlighting the more important lines. For these explorations, I was thinking about the types of audiences this poster is for, which are children and parents, but I chose to focus on emphasizing information that would be more important for parents to look at. In these exercises, I always emphasized the weekly dates, the price, and the website where they can sign up for these camps. After discussions in class, I realized that I could have been more explorative with the font sizing since there were no limits to how big the font can be. Hearing this feedback definitely influenced my later explorations on making dramatic contrasts in scale.
Week 2 (3/8–3/12)
This week was when the color and image explorations came in. It was very fun starting to incorporate these elements into the poster, although I was a bit lost in the beginning because of the endless color combinations.
Color Exercise
I conducted some research on Winchester summer camps by visiting their website to see the design elements they used to promote. I found that their signature color themes are purple and gold, which I thought would be a good place to start.
The second thing I wanted to incorporate into the color exploration was appealing to both groups of audiences, the children and parents. Therefore I decided to try complimentary colors-purple and yellow-and divide up the poster that way. The “rocks” in “Summer Camp rocks” was scaled up because I wanted the poster to appear more fun, although later looking back on it, the “rocks” definitely undermines the summer camp aspect of it and is misleading for a title.
On the left side is where all the important information for parents is placed, such as dates, price, and time. On the right side is all the fun information about what’s involved during the camps, which was more appealing for children.
Some feedback I got during class crit:
- Color contrast is too much and the divide is too apparent for page composition.
- Since the division is not exactly down the middle but also very close to it, it becomes compositionally confusing.
- The separation of event titles and the rest of the information is too big to comprehend them as being related to each other horizontally.
- There is a lot going on in terms of scale and text touching the border, which may need to be dialed back a bit.
For this exercise I wish I could have done more exploring for color combinations and finding a color palette that was appealing to parents and children. However, I had a hard time exploring in breadth as the final review for my second-year architecture studio was the same week and that took away most of my available time.
Image Exercise
For images, my main area of struggle for this specific poster theme was that many photos associated with “summer camp” or “kids” appeared to be very stock image-like. In addition, I also did not want the images to appear too much like an arts and craft project, which was also the majority of images I came across when searching related keywords. Therefore I attempted to go for a more abstract approach. I searched for specific activities that were mentioned on the camp poster, like legos, fairy tales, and slime, which came out with some very interesting results (like the abstracted lego wall). Along the same lines, I also searched for words I wanted to associate the poster with, which were creativity, fun, and bright like summer. This resulted in a lot of art and paint-related images.
For Thursday, although I did not have a lot of time to make iterations, I decided to take a very different direction from my color exercise and find colors according to my own interpretations instead of from the website. This time I tried a much more vibrant color palette which reminds me of summer and creativity. I also attempted more playful ways of dividing up the space with curves and allowing the type to follow along. I chose to incorporate the yellow brush image because it feels like an abstract way to infer creativity and learning. the yellow tip of the brush follows that curve into the orange area, suggesting it’s painting onto the poster.
I also played around with hierarchy of displaying the more detailed information with stroke weights and color, which now makes more sense from the previous exercises. Some feedbacks I got were that the white letters popped out much more than the orange letters.
Over the weekend as I had more time, I started to refine my design language and come up with the direction I wanted to take this poster to. I started with a collection of Pinterest inspirations focusing on the color yellow and white space.
These precedents gave me a lot of ideas on exploring more with scaling of the titles.
These are some preliminary sketches I made prior to making the final pivot in my poster design. I wanted to play with the scaling and composition of the word “summer” or “camp” and have it fill up the page.
To be more empathetic towards the audience, I also did a little exercise on coming up with any words that came into mind when thinking about summer camps. I asked my friends to think back to their times in summer camps and we had a fun conversation about the different experiences we had. After the conversation, I felt like it was necessary to design the poster as more fun and relaxing than academic.
Week 3 (3/15–3/19)
For the third round of iterations, I tested out digitally the visions from my sketches, however the placing of letters was very difficult to do when I wanted it to fit within some type of grid. After several iterations, I learned that the emphasis on “summer” was not the most ideal and the photo reminded me more of a museum poster rather than a summer camp poster.
However, I thought that the hierarchy of texts this time was more sucessful and gave a lot of room for blank space on the page, which was what I wanted. Therefore I made another iteration to reduce the title size. I thought the contrast between white and yellow-ish orange was effective.
Finally, I went through an additional search to look for an image that could potentially tie everything together. This time, I focused on the keywords yellow and creativity. After narrowing it down, these are the final images I was choosing from. I felt like the yellow pencil and the solid colors would express the feeling of summer camp very well and add to the composition.
The final iterations:
