Well, I finally finished my poster. It's not exactly a movie poster like it was supposed to be, but I was inspired to do something a little different. This poster is for an event called "Music Speaks: a day of music and art" held annually in Britt Ballroom. Actually, it's not a real event, but it should be. Am I right? Anyway, I tried to follow the same guidelines as I would have when doing a movie poster... flat colors, limited pallet, diagonals, etc. I started with just the guitar. I constructed it entirely out of letters, numbers and symbols. That took a while but when it was finished it wasn't changed again. The rest of the poster went through several revisions. Originally, the "music speaks" was sitting where "a day of music and art" are now. Then it moved and reoriented vertically on the left side and gained the text masked inside until it reached its final resting place. The info went through some, but not much revision...mostly kerning and tracking. The last thing to be added was the speech bubble. That went under the knife just once before I was happy with it. p.s. the web address isn't a real site... at least not right now.
Great job with the guitar. It would be interesting to use it in other posters (say if this were a recurring event). In other variations you could play around with the scale (no pun intended) a little, highlighting the individual symbols by showing only parts of the guitar.
ReplyDeleteThe knocked-out text with more text behind it works well too. I especially like the way that the negative leading pulls the two lines of text into a single unified design.
The rectangular layout with the date and place is another element that could be reused in other posters.
Given your strong sense of geometry, you might be interested in work by Josef Müler-Brockmann, especially his highly geometric poster designs like this one:
www.internationalposter.com/pimages/SWL11169.jpg
A google image search will turn up lots of other examples. There's a nice discussion of his work in the book "Geometry of Design" by Kimberly Elam.