Wednesday 19th October. 2016
Aidan Nolan - Workshop 2
For the second workshop in Aidan's Process and Production sessions for the first term, we were told to create a series of poster designs for some miniature briefs within the given InDesign document. These briefs included; Acoustic night, Huddersfield craft beer expo and one based on a typographic designer of your choice. As you can see below I have completed all of the above in my own design styles. The challenge to keep the posters strictly on a type-only basis was a real challenge but were all attained with different styles. It made us think in a more focused area before creating something, which is what I liked most about the workshop.
The first brief, acoustic night, which had us create a poster to promote an event in Huddersfield posed an interesting place to look at for design inspiration. As I heard that it was an acoustic night out, I took the word acoustic and started to play on that the most out of the rest of the poster. The white lines dashing across the design whilst remaining in the projects colour scheme were there to form some resemblance to a guitars strings. Also, from what I had found when doing brief research into this topic, I saw that many posters akin to this had a similar skew on the typefaces used on the designs, which is where I got the inspiration for it. Within the letters themselves, I embossed them to get close to the effect found on guitars themselves - as many have lettering on them to name it, but the type is also raised off of the guitars surface. A couple of other experiments were done before coming to this outcome which can be found below;
Before being able to finish my design on the shown choice, I played around with the composition until it was balanced just enough on both the top and bottom of the page. Initially it was much higher than it is in the final outcome, but was moved down to compensate for the spacing at the bottom.
The second brief within the workshop package was the craft beer expo that required a promotional poster for the design. Being critical, I didn't like this design as the type wasn't working in my favour, even after further attempts I couldn't get the bend to look right. This is something that I plan on going back to re-try before the summative assessment. However, the premise of the design as a whole was to follow either a bottle cap or the design of a beer mat to establish a connection between the craft beverages and the poster design itself. This is evidence when looking at the main render of the design, as it should be apparent that it resembles the round shape of a bottle cap, and is very similar to many different beer bottle packaging designs.
And the final poster design of the session was to create something based around a favoured typographic designer of ours. So, I chose Craig Ward because he's the only name that came to mind within a few seconds of discussing the topic of the poster. As I state in the poster, his work and who he has worked for specifically is what drew me into the typographic designer in the first place. Ward is a very practical typographer who mixes physical objects with different typefaces to accomplish different means. There were other designers that came to mind when thinking of this later on, but I felt that his work is what stood out to me the most from my own selection of designers.
